National Affairs Columnist, National Review
John Fund is National Affairs Columnist for National Review magazine and a on-air analyst on the Fox News Channel. He is considered a notable expert on American politics and the nexus between politics and economics.
He previously served as a columnist and editorial board member for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including Who's Counting: Bow Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote At Risk (Encounter Books, 2012); Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books, 2008) and The Dangers of Regulation Through Litigation (ATRA Press, 2008). He worked as a research analyst for the California Legislature in Sacramento before beginning his journalism career as a reporter for the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, called him "the Tom Paine of the modern Congressional reform movement." He has won awards from the Institute for Justice, The School Choice Aliance and the Warren Brooks award for journalistic excellence from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Senior Legal Fellow, Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law, Advancing American Freedom
Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.
In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.
Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.
Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.
In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.
Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.
Vice President for Strategy, The Competitive Enterprise Institute
Iain Murray is the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Vice President of Strategy. For the past decade with the Institute, he has concentrated on financial regulation, employment and immigration regulation and free market environmentalism.
Mr. Murray has published several acclaimed books, including Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You and The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won’t Tell You About – Because They Helped Cause Them. His op-eds have appeared in The National Review, The Providence Journal and Fox News. He has appeared on Fox News, CNN Headline News, the BBC and Al-Jazeera, among other broadcast networks.
In addition to his work at CEI, Murray is the visiting fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and board members of the Cherish Freedom Trust and American Friends of the Taxpayers Alliance and advisory board members of Global Britain and Young Britons Foundation.
Prior to coming to CEI in 2003, Murray was the Director of Research for the Statistical Assessment Service and the Executive Officer of HM Department of Transport. He received his MBA from the University of London and his MA from the University of Oxford.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Ella A. and Ernest H. Fisher Professor of Law, Ohio Northern University Claude W. Pettit College of Law
Professor Lewis joined the Ohio Northern faculty in August, 2006. Lewis flew F-14's for the United States Navy in Operation Desert Shield, conducted strike planning for Desert Storm and was deployed to the Persian Gulf to enforce the no-fly zone over Iraq. He was a Topgun graduate in 1992 and was featured in a NOVA documentary on Topgun and aircraft carriers.
After his naval service, Lewis graduated from Harvard Law School, cum laude, was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, and served as a litigation associate with McGuireWoods, LLP, in Norfolk, Virginia.
Professor Lewis has published more than a dozen articles and essays on various aspects of the law of war and the conflict between the US and al Qaeda. His work has been cited by the Seventh, Ninth and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals. He has testified before Congress on the legality of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and on the civil liberties tradeoffs associated with trying some Al Qaeda members or terrorist suspects before military commissions. His op-eds have appeared in numerous media outlets including the LA Times and the New York Post and he has appeared on Public Radio International to discuss the increasing use of armed drones in warfare. He has delivered scores of presentations and panel presentations before military and law school audiences alike including presentations to the international Military Operations Law conference in Queensland, Australia, the US Army's JAG School in Charlottesville, VA and law school events at Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, Duke, Texas and Northwestern among others.
Professor Lewis received the Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching for the 2007-08 academic year.
He currently teaches Commercial Law, International Law, a Law of War Seminar and Torts. He has also taught Corporate Finance and Accounting for Lawyers. His other teaching interests include Civil Procedure and Contracts.
Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley; Senior Research Fellow, School of Civic Leadership, Civitas Institute, University of Texas at Austin; Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law. He is also Distinguished Visiting Scholar, School of Civic Leadership and Senior Research Fellow, Civitas Institute, at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
His most recent book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court, co-authored with Robert Delahunty, was published in 2023. Professor Yoo’s other books include Defender-in-Chief: Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power; Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War, Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare, and Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George Bush.
Professor Yoo has published more than 100 articles in academic journals on subjects including national security, constitutional law, international law, and the Supreme Court. He also regularly contributes to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and National Review, among others.
Professor Yoo has served in all three branches of government. He was an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the 9/11 attacks. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. He has been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and federal appeals Judge Laurence Silberman. He has been a visiting professor at Seoul National University in South Korea, the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, Keio University in Japan, Trento University in Italy, the University of Chicago, and the Free University of Amsterdam.
Professor Yoo supervises the Public Law and Policy Program and the California Constitution Center. He also serves on the boards of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Federalist Society’s Separation of Powers and Federalism Division, the Universidad Cientifica del Sur Law School, and the Asia-Pacific Law Institute at Seoul National University. He is a winner of the Federalist Society’s Paul Bator award and been the Edwin Meese III Originalism Lecturer at the Heritage Foundation.
Professor Yoo graduated from Yale Law School and summa cum laude from Harvard College.
Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).
After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.
In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.
Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.
Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.
In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.
Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.
Vice President for Strategy, The Competitive Enterprise Institute
Iain Murray is the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Vice President of Strategy. For the past decade with the Institute, he has concentrated on financial regulation, employment and immigration regulation and free market environmentalism.
Mr. Murray has published several acclaimed books, including Stealing You Blind: How Government Fatcats Are Getting Rich Off of You and The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Won’t Tell You About – Because They Helped Cause Them. His op-eds have appeared in The National Review, The Providence Journal and Fox News. He has appeared on Fox News, CNN Headline News, the BBC and Al-Jazeera, among other broadcast networks.
In addition to his work at CEI, Murray is the visiting fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and board members of the Cherish Freedom Trust and American Friends of the Taxpayers Alliance and advisory board members of Global Britain and Young Britons Foundation.
Prior to coming to CEI in 2003, Murray was the Director of Research for the Statistical Assessment Service and the Executive Officer of HM Department of Transport. He received his MBA from the University of London and his MA from the University of Oxford.
George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University
TODD J. ZYWICKI is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University and Research Fellow of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. During the Fall 2023 semester he served as the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy for the Bruce Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2020-2021 he was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law. In 2021 he was inducted to the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers. He is also a Senior Fellow of the F.A. Hayek Program for the Advanced Study of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at George Mason University and a former Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute. From 2015-2017 he was Executive Director of the George Mason Law and Economics Center. He served as Co-Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review from 2006-2017. From 2003-2004, Professor Zywicki served as the Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Mississippi College School of Law, and China University of Political Science and Law.
Professor Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was executive editor of the Virginia Tax Review and John M. Olin Scholar in Law and Economics. Professor Zywicki also received an M.A. in Economics from Clemson University and an A.B. cum Laude with high honors in his major from Dartmouth College.
Professor Zywicki is also a Lone Mountain Fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center, a Fellow of the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy, and a former Senior Fellow of the Goldwater Institute. During the Fall 2008 Semester Professor Zywicki was the Searle Fellow of the George Mason University School of Law and was a 2008-09 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Arch W. Shaw National Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He has lectured and consulted with government officials around the world, including Iceland, Italy, Japan, and Guatemala. In 2006 Professor Zywicki served as a Member of the United States Department of Justice Study Group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.”
Professor Zywicki is the author of more than 130 articles in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed economics journals. He is one of the Top 10 most-cited law professors in the field of Commercial Law and one of the Top 25 law professors on Twitter as measured by engagement levels. He is one of the Top 50 Most Downloaded Law Authors at the Social Science Research Network. He has testified multiple times before Congress on issues of consumer bankruptcy law and consumer credit and is a frequent commentator on legal issues in the print and broadcast media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Nightline, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Neil Cavuto Show, Fox & Friends, Smerconish, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fox Business, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg News, BBC, The Diane Rehm Show, Lou Dobbs Show, Jerry Doyle Show, and The Laura Ingraham Show.
Professor Zywicki is former Chairman and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Humane Studies, Bill of Rights Institute, the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society's Financial Institutions and E-Commerce Practice Group, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment. He formerly served on the Governing Board and the Advisory Council for the Financial Services Research Program at George Washington University School of Business. He is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Council for the following organizations: The Bill of Rights Institute, the film “We the People in IMAX,” and the McCormick-Tribune Foundation “Freedom Museum” in Chicago, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Yorktown University. From 2005-2009 he served as an elected Alumni Trustee of the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees.
Partner, Kirkland and Ellis, LLP
John O'Quinn is a Partner in Kirkland's Washington, D.C. office. His practice focuses on litigation, including intellectual property disputes, commercial litigation, regulatory issues arising from or likely to lead to litigation, and other complex litigation matters at both the trial and appellate levels. He has extensive argument experience before both trial and appellate courts, and has argued in most of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, including the D.C. Circuit and the Federal Circuit. Mr. O'Quinn has been to trial multiple times, where he has examined expert and fact witnesses. Representative clients include Apple, Boeing, B. Braun Medical, Charter Communications, C.R. Bard, POET LLC, Siemens, and Teva Pharmaceuticals.
From 2006 to 2009, Mr. O'Quinn served in the United States Department of Justice. As Deputy Associate Attorney General, he was responsible for helping to oversee much of the government's civil litigation and reviewing proposed settlements of multi-million dollar civil cases brought by or against the government. As the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division, Mr. O'Quinn supervised over 100 attorneys charged with defending the constitutionality of federal statutes and regulations, representing the diplomatic and national security interests of the United States in court, and conducting significant Title VII, personnel, social security, Medicare and Medicaid-related litigation. Mr. O'Quinn worked with counsel from virtually every federal agency on complex civil litigation matters and personally directed significant cases defending the government's interests, arguing more than 20 cases in federal court. In February of 2009, Mr. O'Quinn was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service for his leadership in defending the Department of Defense in lawsuits challenging the detention and trial of enemy combatants captured abroad by United States Armed Forces.
Mr. O'Quinn was previously an associate with Kirkland from 2003 to 2006. While on leave from the Firm, he served as special counsel to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary for the nomination of Chief Justice Roberts. Prior to joining the Firm, Mr. O'Quinn was a law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
While at Kirkland, Mr. O'Quinn has also provided legal counseling and representation for individuals and organizations on a pro bono basis, including arguing a habeas petition on behalf of a defendant convicted of capital murder, and submitting FOIA requests on behalf of a civil rights organization.
Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts, Georgetown Law
Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.
Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which won the 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. Vladeck is also a highly regarded appellate advocate, having argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and over a dozen before various lower federal civilian and military courts. He has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession—including the 2024 University of Texas President’s Research Impact Award and his selection by the Order of the Coif to serve as its Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2025.
Vladeck is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court. Together with Bobby Chesney, Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is also a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is a member of the Board of Trustees of EarthJustice—the nation’s premier nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.
Vladeck graduated from Yale Law School in 2004—where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for outstanding moot court oralist and shared the Potter Stewart Prize for best moot court team performance. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in the District with his wife, Karen (Founder and Managing Partner of Risepoint Search Partners); their daughters, Madeleine and Sydney; and their eleven-year-old pug, Roxanna.
Sandra Day O'Connor Professor of Law & Professor of Government, William & Mary Law School
Neal Devins is the Sandra Day O’Connor Professor of Law and Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of several books and more than 100 articles and book chapters on courts, constitutional law, and law & politics. His books include The Company They Keep (Oxford 2019) (with Larry Baum), The Democratic Constitution (Oxford 2d ed. 2015) (with Louis Fisher), Political Dynamics of Constitutional Law (West 6th ed. 2019) (with Louis Fisher), and Shaping Constitutional Values: The Supreme Court, Elected Government, and the Abortion Dispute (Johns Hopkins University Press 1996). His articles have appeared in The Yale Law Journal, The Stanford Law Review, The Columbia Law Review, The Michigan Law Review, The California Law Review, The Virginia Law Review, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, The University of Chicago Law Review, The New York University Law Review, and several other journals and magazines. Professor Devins is also the author of op-eds appearing in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, and several other newspapers. He has testified before House and Senate committees on budget reform and the separation of powers. Professor Devins is a graduate of Georgetown University (A.B. 1978) and Vanderbilt Law School (J.D. 1982).
Attorney General, State of Colorado
John W. Suthers is a lifetime resident of Colorado. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Government in 1974 and from the University of Colorado Law School in 1977. From 1977 to 1981, he served as a deputy and chief deputy district attorney in Colorado Springs. From September of 1979 to January of 1981, he headed the Economic Crime Division of the District Attorney’s Office and co-authored a nationally published book on consumer fraud and white-collar crime.
In January of 1981, Mr. Suthers entered private practice and became a litigation partner in the Colorado Springs firm of Sparks Dix, P.C. He remained with the firm until November of 1988, when he defeated an incumbent to be elected District Attorney of the Fourth Judicial District. He was elected to a second term as District Attorney in November of 1992. At the conclusion of that second term in January of 1997, he returned to Sparks Dix, P.C. as Senior Counsel in charge of the firm’s litigation section.
On January 12, 1999, Gov. Bill Owens appointed Mr. Suthers as the executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections. As head of the Colorado correctional system, he was in charge of an organization with nearly 6,000 employees and an annual operational budget of approximately $500 million.
On July 30, 2001, Mr. Suthers was nominated by President George W. Bush to be the United States Attorney for the District of Colorado. He was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. As U.S. Attorney, Mr. Suthers represented the United States in all criminal and civil matters within the District of Colorado.
On January 4, 2005, Mr. Suthers was appointed Attorney General of Colorado. After serving as Attorney General for nearly two years, in November 2006, the voters of Colorado elected Mr. Suthers by a large margin to serve a four-year term. Mr. Suthers was again re-elected in 2010 by the biggest margin or any statewide race that year. As Attorney General, he represents and defends the interests of the people of the state of Colorado and is chief legal counsel and adviser to state government and its many state agencies, boards and commissions.
Mr. Suthers has served on the board of numerous civic organizations. He has served as President of the El Paso County Bar Association in 1990-91 and as Senior Vice President of the Colorado Bar Association in 1996-97. He served as President of the Colorado District Attorney’s Council in 1994-95. In 1992, he was appointed by the Colorado legislature to serve as a Colorado delegate to the National Conference on Uniform State Laws and served until January of 1997. In the Summer of 2000, Mr. Suthers received a Gates Foundation Fellowship to attend the Government Executives Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
John and his wife Janet have two adult daughters. Alison is a Deputy District Attorney in Denver. Kate is a procurement analyst for the Defense Department in Pearl Harbor and a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves.
Suthers has authored five books, including his most recent, No Higher Calling, No Greater Responsibility: A Prosecutor Makes His Case (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008).
In his tenure as Attorney General, Mr. Suthers has initiated successful programs to protect children from Internet predators and to reduce mortgage and foreclosure fraud. He has served as Chairman of the Conference of Western Attorneys General, a member of the NAAG Executive Committee, Co-Chair of the NAAG Criminal Law Committee and as a member of the U.S. Attorney General’s Executive Working Group.
Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Legislation
[Return to Table of Contents] XX. Legislation Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (3d ed....
Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Federal Courts
[Return to Table of Contents] XIV. Federal Courts Henry Hart & Herbert Wechsler, The Federal...
Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Criminal Law and Procedure
[Return to Table of Contents] XI. Criminal Law & Procedure Criminality and Responsibility Gary Becker,...
Conservative & Libertarian Legal Scholarship: Antitrust Law
[Return to Table of Contents] VII. Antitrust Law Economic Analysis and Antitrust Law (Terry Calvani...
Obama's Enforcer: Eric Holder's Justice Department
TeleforumOperation Chokepoint - Necessary Oversight or an Attack on Legitimate Businesses? - Podcast
Charles J. Cooper, Iain Murray, Todd J. Zywicki
Operation Chokepoint is a new initiative of the Obama administration led by the Department of...
Operation Chokepoint - Necessary Oversight or an Attack on Legitimate Businesses?
TeleforumThe Legal and Policy Implications of Closing Guantánamo Bay - Podcast
John C. O'Quinn, Stephen I. Vladeck
Would relocation of War on Terror detainees currently held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba into the...
Can the Law of War Meet 21st Century Threats?
New York, New YorkDo State Attorneys General Have a Duty to Defend State Laws? - Podcast
Neal E. Devins, John W. Suthers
Recently U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, citing the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in United States...