Chairman, Secura/Isaac Group
William “Bill” Isaac served as Chairman of the FDIC during one of the most important and tumultuous periods in US banking history. Some 3,000 banks and thrifts failed during the 1980s, including Continental Illinois and nine of the ten largest banks in Texas. In addition to the failures of many of the largest regional banks throughout the US, most of the money center banks in the US were on the watch list due in large part to the enormous amount of loans on their books to less developed countries.
President Carter appointed Bill Isaac to the board of the FDIC in 1978. He was confirmed by the Senate at the age of 34. President Reagan named him Chairman of the FDIC two years later, making him the youngest FDIC board member and Chairman in history. Bill Isaac also served as Chairman of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (1983-85), as a member of the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee (1981–85), and on the Vice President’s Task Group on Regulation of Financial Services (1984).
Bill Isaac is currently Chairman and principal owner of three premier consulting firms, Secura/Isaac Consulting, Blue SaaS Solutions, and Secura/Isaac Talent Advisors. He is a member of the boards of directors of Emigrant Bank and New York Private Bank & Trust and serves as Chairman of Sarasota Private Trust and Cleveland Private Trust, all of which are owned by Howard Milstein and his family.
After completing his service as Chairman of the FDIC at the end of 1985, Bill Isaac founded The Secura Group, a leading consulting firm, which he sold in 2008. He served as Chairman of the Board of Fifth Third Bancorp, one of the nation’s leading banks, and worked as Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting from 2011 to 2019. He then joined Howard Milstein in the financial services business. Bill Isaac is a former board member at TSYS, a leading payment processing company that today is part of Global Payments. He has served on the boards of Amex Bank, The Associates (a finance company formerly owned by Ford Motor Company), credit reporting company TransUnion, and staffing firm MPS Group.
Bill Isaac is involved extensively in thought leadership relating to the financial industry. He is the author of ‘Senseless Panic: How Washington Failed America’ with a foreword by legendary former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. ‘Senseless Panic’ provides an inside account of the banking and savings and loans crises of the 1980s and compares that period to the financial crisis of 2008/2009. Bill Isaac’s articles appear in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Hill, American Banker, Forbes, the Financial Times, the Washington Times, and other leading publications. He appears regularly on television and radio, testifies before Congress, and is a speaker before audiences throughout the world (www.WilliamIsaac.com).
Bill Isaac was formerly a senior partner at Arnold & Porter, which was a founding partner of The Secura Group. He left the law firm in 1993 when Secura purchased Arnold & Porter’s interest in Secura. Before his appointment to the FDIC, Bill Isaac served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of First Kentucky National Corporation and its subsidiaries, including First National Bank of Louisville and First Kentucky Trust Company. He began his career with Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee where he practiced general corporate law specializing in banking law.
Bill Isaac received a Distinguished Achievement Medal in 1995 from Miami University and a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 from The Ohio State University. He is a Life member of both the Board of Directors of the Miami University Foundation and the Board of Directors of The Ohio State University Foundation. Bill co- founded in 2016, with his former classmate, the William Isaac & Michael Oxley Center for Business Leadership at Miami University.
Partner, Simpson Thacher
Mr. Noreika leads projects related to the U.S. banking industry, as well as clients that span beyond traditional banking including financial technology and cryptocurrency companies. He is the company’s focal point for C-suite advice on compliance and regulatory requirements at all levels, domestic and international.
Prior to joining Patomak, Mr. Noreika was a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and was a lead lawyer in the firm’s financial institutions regulatory practice, focusing on banking regulation and related litigation. In that role, he advised domestic and international financial institutions on regulatory issues relating to mergers and acquisitions, minority investments, capital issuances, structuring and compliance activities, and litigation matters.
Mr. Noreika’s extensive experience includes advising regional and multinational banks on the structuring of their U.S. operations, compliance with the Volcker Rule, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other federal agency regulations, Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering rules, as well as transactional matters and related regulatory applications. He has counseled numerous private equity funds with respect to investments in banking organizations.
In 2017, Mr. Noreika served as acting Comptroller of the Currency where he led the 4,000-person independent agency responsible for chartering, regulating, and supervising all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in the U.S. There, he worked to make regulation more accountable, improved the efficiency of chartering and licensing decisions, and sought the enhance the value of the national bank and federal thrift charters and their ability to meet the credit and banking needs of their communities. In this role, he also served as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and member of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
Mr. Noreika has been recognized as a leader in his field by Chambers USA in “Financial Services Regulation: Banking Compliance” since 2014. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his B.S. in economics with a concentration in finance from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Robert Kavesh Professorship in Economics, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University
Lawrence J. White has been with New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business for more than 35 years. His primary research areas of interest include financial regulation, antitrust, network industries, international banking and applied microeconomics.
Professor White has published numerous articles in the Journal of Business, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading journals in economics, finance, and law. He is the author of The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation, among other books, and he is the co-editor (with John Kwoka) of the 6th of edition of The Antitrust Revolution. He contributed chapters to both of the NYU Stern books on the financial crisis - Restoring Financial Stability and Regulating Wall Street. He is the co-author (with Stern's Viral Acharya, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh) of Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance.
Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice (incoming)
Adam Griffin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. During law school, he served as a research assistant to Professor Stephen E. Sachs and UNC Law Dean Martin Brinkley. After law school, he spent two years litigating for liberty at the Institute for Justice as an inaugural Law and Liberty Fellow. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Richard E. Myers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and is now a separation-of-powers attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Tocqueville Associate Professor Department of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Religion & Public Life in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the founding director of Notre Dame's undergraduate minor in Constitutional Studies and directs Notre Dame's Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life.
Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy with a focus on religious liberty and the American Founding. His first book, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009) won the Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for the best publication on religion and politics in 2009 and 2010. His First Amendment church-state case reader, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents (Rowman & Littlefield) was first published in 2013 (revised edition, 2015) and is being used at Notre Dame and other leading universities.
Muñoz's current project is a scholarly monograph on the natural right of religious liberty and the original meaning of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. Articles from that project have appeared in American Political Science Review, The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Notre Dame Law Review, American Political Thought, and the University of Pennsylvania's Journal of Constitutional Law.
Trial Attorney, Civil Rights Division, United States Department of Justice (incoming)
Adam Griffin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. During law school, he served as a research assistant to Professor Stephen E. Sachs and UNC Law Dean Martin Brinkley. After law school, he spent two years litigating for liberty at the Institute for Justice as an inaugural Law and Liberty Fellow. He served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Richard E. Myers in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and is now a separation-of-powers attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in mid-2023. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. More recently, he was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.
Tocqueville Associate Professor Department of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Religion & Public Life in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is the founding director of Notre Dame's undergraduate minor in Constitutional Studies and directs Notre Dame's Tocqueville Program for Inquiry into Religion and Public Life.
Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy with a focus on religious liberty and the American Founding. His first book, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009) won the Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for the best publication on religion and politics in 2009 and 2010. His First Amendment church-state case reader, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents (Rowman & Littlefield) was first published in 2013 (revised edition, 2015) and is being used at Notre Dame and other leading universities.
Muñoz's current project is a scholarly monograph on the natural right of religious liberty and the original meaning of the First Amendment's Religion Clauses. Articles from that project have appeared in American Political Science Review, The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Notre Dame Law Review, American Political Thought, and the University of Pennsylvania's Journal of Constitutional Law.
Chairman, Secura/Isaac Group
William “Bill” Isaac served as Chairman of the FDIC during one of the most important and tumultuous periods in US banking history. Some 3,000 banks and thrifts failed during the 1980s, including Continental Illinois and nine of the ten largest banks in Texas. In addition to the failures of many of the largest regional banks throughout the US, most of the money center banks in the US were on the watch list due in large part to the enormous amount of loans on their books to less developed countries.
President Carter appointed Bill Isaac to the board of the FDIC in 1978. He was confirmed by the Senate at the age of 34. President Reagan named him Chairman of the FDIC two years later, making him the youngest FDIC board member and Chairman in history. Bill Isaac also served as Chairman of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (1983-85), as a member of the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee (1981–85), and on the Vice President’s Task Group on Regulation of Financial Services (1984).
Bill Isaac is currently Chairman and principal owner of three premier consulting firms, Secura/Isaac Consulting, Blue SaaS Solutions, and Secura/Isaac Talent Advisors. He is a member of the boards of directors of Emigrant Bank and New York Private Bank & Trust and serves as Chairman of Sarasota Private Trust and Cleveland Private Trust, all of which are owned by Howard Milstein and his family.
After completing his service as Chairman of the FDIC at the end of 1985, Bill Isaac founded The Secura Group, a leading consulting firm, which he sold in 2008. He served as Chairman of the Board of Fifth Third Bancorp, one of the nation’s leading banks, and worked as Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting from 2011 to 2019. He then joined Howard Milstein in the financial services business. Bill Isaac is a former board member at TSYS, a leading payment processing company that today is part of Global Payments. He has served on the boards of Amex Bank, The Associates (a finance company formerly owned by Ford Motor Company), credit reporting company TransUnion, and staffing firm MPS Group.
Bill Isaac is involved extensively in thought leadership relating to the financial industry. He is the author of ‘Senseless Panic: How Washington Failed America’ with a foreword by legendary former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. ‘Senseless Panic’ provides an inside account of the banking and savings and loans crises of the 1980s and compares that period to the financial crisis of 2008/2009. Bill Isaac’s articles appear in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Hill, American Banker, Forbes, the Financial Times, the Washington Times, and other leading publications. He appears regularly on television and radio, testifies before Congress, and is a speaker before audiences throughout the world (www.WilliamIsaac.com).
Bill Isaac was formerly a senior partner at Arnold & Porter, which was a founding partner of The Secura Group. He left the law firm in 1993 when Secura purchased Arnold & Porter’s interest in Secura. Before his appointment to the FDIC, Bill Isaac served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of First Kentucky National Corporation and its subsidiaries, including First National Bank of Louisville and First Kentucky Trust Company. He began his career with Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee where he practiced general corporate law specializing in banking law.
Bill Isaac received a Distinguished Achievement Medal in 1995 from Miami University and a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 from The Ohio State University. He is a Life member of both the Board of Directors of the Miami University Foundation and the Board of Directors of The Ohio State University Foundation. Bill co- founded in 2016, with his former classmate, the William Isaac & Michael Oxley Center for Business Leadership at Miami University.
Partner, Simpson Thacher
Mr. Noreika leads projects related to the U.S. banking industry, as well as clients that span beyond traditional banking including financial technology and cryptocurrency companies. He is the company’s focal point for C-suite advice on compliance and regulatory requirements at all levels, domestic and international.
Prior to joining Patomak, Mr. Noreika was a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and was a lead lawyer in the firm’s financial institutions regulatory practice, focusing on banking regulation and related litigation. In that role, he advised domestic and international financial institutions on regulatory issues relating to mergers and acquisitions, minority investments, capital issuances, structuring and compliance activities, and litigation matters.
Mr. Noreika’s extensive experience includes advising regional and multinational banks on the structuring of their U.S. operations, compliance with the Volcker Rule, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other federal agency regulations, Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering rules, as well as transactional matters and related regulatory applications. He has counseled numerous private equity funds with respect to investments in banking organizations.
In 2017, Mr. Noreika served as acting Comptroller of the Currency where he led the 4,000-person independent agency responsible for chartering, regulating, and supervising all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in the U.S. There, he worked to make regulation more accountable, improved the efficiency of chartering and licensing decisions, and sought the enhance the value of the national bank and federal thrift charters and their ability to meet the credit and banking needs of their communities. In this role, he also served as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and member of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
Mr. Noreika has been recognized as a leader in his field by Chambers USA in “Financial Services Regulation: Banking Compliance” since 2014. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his B.S. in economics with a concentration in finance from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Robert Kavesh Professorship in Economics, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University
Lawrence J. White has been with New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business for more than 35 years. His primary research areas of interest include financial regulation, antitrust, network industries, international banking and applied microeconomics.
Professor White has published numerous articles in the Journal of Business, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading journals in economics, finance, and law. He is the author of The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation, among other books, and he is the co-editor (with John Kwoka) of the 6th of edition of The Antitrust Revolution. He contributed chapters to both of the NYU Stern books on the financial crisis - Restoring Financial Stability and Regulating Wall Street. He is the co-author (with Stern's Viral Acharya, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh) of Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance.
Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Sadanand Dhume writes about South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society, with a focus on India and Pakistan. He is also a South Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in India and Indonesia and was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. His political travelogue about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist, has been published in four countries.
Judicial Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Nitin is a recent graduate of Cornell Law School. Before his time in Ithaca, he majored in International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and focused on power competition in South Asia during his graduate studies at the University of Oxford.
Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Sadanand Dhume writes about South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society, with a focus on India and Pakistan. He is also a South Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in India and Indonesia and was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. His political travelogue about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist, has been published in four countries.
Judicial Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Nitin is a recent graduate of Cornell Law School. Before his time in Ithaca, he majored in International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and focused on power competition in South Asia during his graduate studies at the University of Oxford.
Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Sadanand Dhume writes about South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society, with a focus on India and Pakistan. He is also a South Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in India and Indonesia and was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. His political travelogue about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist, has been published in four countries.
Judicial Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Nitin is a recent graduate of Cornell Law School. Before his time in Ithaca, he majored in International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and focused on power competition in South Asia during his graduate studies at the University of Oxford.
Chairman, Secura/Isaac Group
William “Bill” Isaac served as Chairman of the FDIC during one of the most important and tumultuous periods in US banking history. Some 3,000 banks and thrifts failed during the 1980s, including Continental Illinois and nine of the ten largest banks in Texas. In addition to the failures of many of the largest regional banks throughout the US, most of the money center banks in the US were on the watch list due in large part to the enormous amount of loans on their books to less developed countries.
President Carter appointed Bill Isaac to the board of the FDIC in 1978. He was confirmed by the Senate at the age of 34. President Reagan named him Chairman of the FDIC two years later, making him the youngest FDIC board member and Chairman in history. Bill Isaac also served as Chairman of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (1983-85), as a member of the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee (1981–85), and on the Vice President’s Task Group on Regulation of Financial Services (1984).
Bill Isaac is currently Chairman and principal owner of three premier consulting firms, Secura/Isaac Consulting, Blue SaaS Solutions, and Secura/Isaac Talent Advisors. He is a member of the boards of directors of Emigrant Bank and New York Private Bank & Trust and serves as Chairman of Sarasota Private Trust and Cleveland Private Trust, all of which are owned by Howard Milstein and his family.
After completing his service as Chairman of the FDIC at the end of 1985, Bill Isaac founded The Secura Group, a leading consulting firm, which he sold in 2008. He served as Chairman of the Board of Fifth Third Bancorp, one of the nation’s leading banks, and worked as Senior Managing Director at FTI Consulting from 2011 to 2019. He then joined Howard Milstein in the financial services business. Bill Isaac is a former board member at TSYS, a leading payment processing company that today is part of Global Payments. He has served on the boards of Amex Bank, The Associates (a finance company formerly owned by Ford Motor Company), credit reporting company TransUnion, and staffing firm MPS Group.
Bill Isaac is involved extensively in thought leadership relating to the financial industry. He is the author of ‘Senseless Panic: How Washington Failed America’ with a foreword by legendary former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. ‘Senseless Panic’ provides an inside account of the banking and savings and loans crises of the 1980s and compares that period to the financial crisis of 2008/2009. Bill Isaac’s articles appear in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Hill, American Banker, Forbes, the Financial Times, the Washington Times, and other leading publications. He appears regularly on television and radio, testifies before Congress, and is a speaker before audiences throughout the world (www.WilliamIsaac.com).
Bill Isaac was formerly a senior partner at Arnold & Porter, which was a founding partner of The Secura Group. He left the law firm in 1993 when Secura purchased Arnold & Porter’s interest in Secura. Before his appointment to the FDIC, Bill Isaac served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of First Kentucky National Corporation and its subsidiaries, including First National Bank of Louisville and First Kentucky Trust Company. He began his career with Foley & Lardner in Milwaukee where he practiced general corporate law specializing in banking law.
Bill Isaac received a Distinguished Achievement Medal in 1995 from Miami University and a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 from The Ohio State University. He is a Life member of both the Board of Directors of the Miami University Foundation and the Board of Directors of The Ohio State University Foundation. Bill co- founded in 2016, with his former classmate, the William Isaac & Michael Oxley Center for Business Leadership at Miami University.
Partner, Simpson Thacher
Mr. Noreika leads projects related to the U.S. banking industry, as well as clients that span beyond traditional banking including financial technology and cryptocurrency companies. He is the company’s focal point for C-suite advice on compliance and regulatory requirements at all levels, domestic and international.
Prior to joining Patomak, Mr. Noreika was a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and was a lead lawyer in the firm’s financial institutions regulatory practice, focusing on banking regulation and related litigation. In that role, he advised domestic and international financial institutions on regulatory issues relating to mergers and acquisitions, minority investments, capital issuances, structuring and compliance activities, and litigation matters.
Mr. Noreika’s extensive experience includes advising regional and multinational banks on the structuring of their U.S. operations, compliance with the Volcker Rule, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other federal agency regulations, Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering rules, as well as transactional matters and related regulatory applications. He has counseled numerous private equity funds with respect to investments in banking organizations.
In 2017, Mr. Noreika served as acting Comptroller of the Currency where he led the 4,000-person independent agency responsible for chartering, regulating, and supervising all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks in the U.S. There, he worked to make regulation more accountable, improved the efficiency of chartering and licensing decisions, and sought the enhance the value of the national bank and federal thrift charters and their ability to meet the credit and banking needs of their communities. In this role, he also served as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and member of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
Mr. Noreika has been recognized as a leader in his field by Chambers USA in “Financial Services Regulation: Banking Compliance” since 2014. He received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his B.S. in economics with a concentration in finance from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Senior Fellow, Mises Institute
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute, providing thought and policy leadership on financial issues and the study of financial systems. His work includes cycles of booms and busts, financial crises with their political responses, housing finance, government-sponsored enterprises, risk and uncertainty, central banking, banking and financial regulation, corporate governance, retirement finance, student loans, and the politics of finance.
He previously served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department 2019-2021. He was a Distinguished Senior Fellow with the R Street Institute 2015-2019 and 2021, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, 2004-2015. Among the many aspects of his AEI work, he developed the One Page Mortgage Form to give borrowers in clear form the key information they need in order to know what they are committing themselves to. He was President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. There he invented the Mortgage Partnership Finance program, which successfully created front-end mortgage credit risk sharing beginning in 1997. His decades of banking experience include being a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 1991.
Pollock was a director of the CME Group 2004-2019 and of Ascendium Education Group 1989-2019. He is a director and past-chairman of the Great Books Foundation and a past president of the International Union for Housing Finance.
He is the co-author of Surprised Again! - The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022), and the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony.
Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University.
His work is available on alexjpollock.com.
Robert Kavesh Professorship in Economics, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University
Lawrence J. White has been with New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business for more than 35 years. His primary research areas of interest include financial regulation, antitrust, network industries, international banking and applied microeconomics.
Professor White has published numerous articles in the Journal of Business, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading journals in economics, finance, and law. He is the author of The S&L Debacle: Public Policy Lessons for Bank and Thrift Regulation, among other books, and he is the co-editor (with John Kwoka) of the 6th of edition of The Antitrust Revolution. He contributed chapters to both of the NYU Stern books on the financial crisis - Restoring Financial Stability and Regulating Wall Street. He is the co-author (with Stern's Viral Acharya, Matthew Richardson, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh) of Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance.
Chairman, Center for Equal Opportunity
Linda Chavez is Chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. She has published opinions and columns in newspapers across the country and appears regularly on cable news. Chavez is the author of the three books: Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation, An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, and Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. She has been honored by the Library of Congress as a "Living Legend" and as nominee for Secretary of Labor by President George W. Bush.
Chavez has held many appointed positions and has served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards. Among her appointed positions has been Chairman, National Commission on Migrant Education (1988-1992); White House Director of Public Liaison (1985); Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983-1985); and member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (1984-1986). Chavez was also the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Maryland in 1986 and was elected by the United Nations' Human Rights Commission to serve a four-year term as U.S. Expert to the U.N. Sub-commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.
Chavez earned her BA from the University of Colorado.
Chief Deputy Attorney General
Ryan Newman is currently Chief Deputy Attorney General for Florida Office of the Attorney General.
During the first Trump Administration, he served as Counselor to the United States Attorney General for national security and international affairs, Deputy General Counsel (Legal Counsel) for the Department of Defense, and Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy at the Department of Justice. Prior to serving in the Executive Branch, Ryan was Chief Counsel to United States Senator Ted Cruz during the 114th Congress.
Ryan served as a law clerk to the Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the United States Supreme Court, the Honorable Richard J. Leon on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and the Honorable J.L. Edmondson on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Prior to law school, Ryan was an armor officer in the United States Army assigned to the 1st Squadron, 10th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (Buffalo Soldiers). He deployed to Iraq in 2003 for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Ryan graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1998. He earned his law degree with high honors from The University of Texas School of Law in 2007.
Vice President of Domestic and Economic Policy, The Heritage Foundation
Roger Severino is Vice President of Economic and Domestic Policy, and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health care law and policy. Find his tweets at @RogerSeverino_.
Severino spearheaded the HHS Accountability Project while a Senior Fellow at EPPC from 2021 to 2023. Previously, Severino was Director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest-serving OCR director of the past three decades.
Prior to joining HHS, Severino served for two years as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage, advocating for life, family, and religious-freedom policies. Before that, he was a trial attorney for seven years at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he enforced the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Severino started his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was Legal Counsel and Chief Operations Officer and defended the rights of people of all faiths under federal and international law.
Severino has been profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, among others. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed him and his wife Carrie, “a conservative power couple” to be reckoned with.
Severino holds a JD from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in public policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Southern California. He was appointed by President Trump to the Administrative Conference of the United States and is a member of the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia bars.
As OCR director, Severino founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement. He enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.
With respect to civil rights, Severino protected older persons and people with disabilities from being denied life-saving care due to discriminatory “quality of life” judgments, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also achieved a landmark sexual harassment resolution with Michigan State University in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal and protected the rights of non-English speakers to have equal access to health and human services.
In the area of health privacy, he secured the largest HIPAA monetary settlement in history and achieved the largest number of enforcement resolutions both in a single year and across four years. He also facilitated the transformational use of Skype, Zoom, and Facetime for delivery of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
His regulatory reform activities resulted in a comprehensive conscience protection regulation and proposed a life-affirming disability rights regulation. He achieved regulatory savings of $3.6 billion in health care industry costs over five years and identified and proposed an additional $3.2 billion in cost savings from the repeal of ineffective and unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Severino is a Spanish speaker who teaches salsa and west coast swing in his spare time.
Vice President, Legal, Backflip
Michael Toth is Vice President, Legal at Backflip. Michael is a seasoned tech General Counsel with over 15 years of corporate counsel and litigation experience. He is skilled at leading legal and policy teams to executive on high-impact initiatives that deliver tech solutions in dynamic markets. Michael's work has been featured in Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Politico, Newsweek, Law 360, and other publications.
Michael has built out full-service legal and regulatory compliance departments, covering contracting, licensing, data privacy and security, employment, and corporate governance. He has represented companies in numerous capital markets transactions and litigated complex commercial cases in private practice. Michael has public-service experience serving a lawyer in the Marine Corps and a senior counsel at the Texas Office of Attorney General. At the Texas AG's office, Michael led the multistate investigation into Google. Michael's work brought together the 49-state coalition that launched a probe in Google's ad tech practices in 2019. Also during his tenure at the Texas AG's office, Michael worked on the opioid multistate and on human trafficking initiatives. In 2018, Michael was appointed to the Austin-based Third Court of Appeals, where he published several opinions on a range of state law issues.
After graduating law school, Michael served on active duty as a lawyer in the United States Marine Corps. A fluent Spanish speaker, Michael completed three overseas legal engagements in South America. Following active duty, Michael was a law clerk for the Honorable Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for the Honorable Ursula Ungaro of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Michael graduated from Stanford University with an honors degree in history and received his law degree and a Masters in history from the University of Virginia. He has published numerous articles on legal topics as well as a book on the early United States Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth. He lives outside of Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.
Partner, Consovoy McCarthy Park PLLC
Mr. Connolly represents clients in discovery, motions practice, trials, and appeals in state and federal courts across the country. He has litigated in a diverse range of subject areas, including civil rights litigation, challenges to administrative actions, contractual and employment disputes, and election law. Mr. Connolly has particular expertise in litigation involving the Federal Arbitration Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Communications Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Connolly recently argued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on behalf of a trade industry and served on the trial team in a high-profile, three-week trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Mr. Connolly is a former law clerk to Judge Jerome A. Holmes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Mr. Connolly is also the director of the Free Speech Clinic at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
Mr. Connolly earned his B.A. from the University of Kansas, where he graduated with distinction and his J.D. from New York University School of Law. Mr. Connolly is a member of the Virginia and District of Columbia bars.
Partner, Ashbrook Byrne Kresge Flowers LLC
Ben Flowers, a partner at Ashbrook Byrne Kresge Flowers LLC, is an accomplished litigator with experience briefing, arguing, and winning high-stakes cases in courts throughout the country.
Before joining the law firm, Ben served as Ohio's 10th Solicitor General. In that role he regularly represented the State of Ohio before the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the Supreme Court of Ohio. Most prominently, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, Ben led a multi-state challenge to OSHA's vaccine mandate, ultimately prevailing before the Supreme Court.
Ben is a graduate of The Ohio State University and the University of Chicago Law School. Following law school, Ben clerked for Judge Sandra Ikuta of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of this United States. Ben lives in Upper Arlington, Ohio with his wife Denise and their three very active children.
Partner, Lehotsky Keller LLP
The New York Times recognized Scott A. Keller as a “legal heavyweight,” who “is praised by opponents as a formidable advocate.”
Mr. Keller has argued 12 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and 12 cases before the Texas Supreme Court. He is the only practicing lawyer to have argued at least 10 cases in both courts. Mr. Keller frequently represents parties in high stakes appeals, and he has argued many cases in federal courts of appeals throughout the nation. He has earned individual accolades from Lawdragon 500 Leading Litigators in America, Chambers, Legal 500, The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal, Law360, Super Lawyers, The Best Lawyers in America, and other publications.
Before founding Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP, Mr. Keller headed Baker Botts LLP’s Supreme Court Practice. He also has significant experience at the highest levels in all three branches of government. Mr. Keller served as the Solicitor General of Texas, the State’s chief appellate litigator. He was U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Keller was a law clerk for Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court of the United States and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was also a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Solicitor General.
Mr. Keller represents clients in cases where public communications strategy is crucial, and he has made numerous media appearances in major outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Fox News, NPR, and Politico. As a sought after speaker and writer, Mr. Keller’s articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. He has also served as an adjunct professor of constitutional litigation, Supreme Court practice, and federal courts at the University of Texas School of Law.
How Risky Are the Banks Now? What Regulatory Reforms Make Sense?
William M. Isaac, Keith Noreika, Alex J. Pollock, Lawrence J. White
Six months ago, we experienced bank runs and three of the four largest bank failures...
Talks with Authors: Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience
Adam F. Griffin, Michael W. McConnell, Vincent Phillip Munoz
Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience investigates...
Talks with Authors: Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience
Adam F. Griffin, Michael W. McConnell, Vincent Phillip Munoz
Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience investigates...
How Risky Are the Banks Now? What Regulatory Reforms Make Sense?
William M. Isaac, Keith Noreika, Alex J. Pollock, Lawrence J. White
Six months ago, we experienced bank runs and three of the four largest bank failures...
US-India Relations: An Important but Ambiguous Partnership
TeleforumUS-India Relations: An Important but Ambiguous Partnership
Sadanand Dhume, Nitin R. Nainani
In June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed a highly-publicized visit to Washington that included...
US-India Relations: An Important but Ambiguous Partnership
Sadanand Dhume, Nitin R. Nainani
In June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed a highly-publicized visit to Washington that included...
How Risky Are the Banks Now? What Regulatory Reforms Make Sense?
A Regulatory Transparency Project Webinar
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Fernandina Beach, FL