Co-Founder, Defense of Freedom Institute
Jim Blew is a co-founder of DFI, the Defense of Freedom Institute for Public Policy Studies, and president of DFI Action. These DC-based nonprofits promote education freedom, civil rights, and a limited federal role in education and workforce development.
Jim served as U.S. assistant secretary for policy and budget under Betsy DeVos. Prior to his federal service, he worked in state-based education reform for more than 20 years, including leadership roles at StudentsFirst, 50CAN, and the predecessor to the American Federation for Children. He also helped guide the education reform investments of the Walton Family Foundation for nearly a decade until 2014. Before committing himself full time to education reform, Jim worked at political and communications firms in New York and California. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Occidental College and a master’s in business administration from the Yale School of Management.
Vice President of Legal Affairs & Director of Legal Defense & Education Center, EdChoice
Leslie Hiner, Esq. is an advocate of educational freedom, a crusader fighting for the unencumbered opportunity of parents to decide how and where their children will be educated. She believes in the power of individuals to change the world, and believes personal liberty will be enhanced when our method of funding K–12 education is changed to empower parents and students before institutions.
As vice president of legal affairs at EdChoice, the nation’s leading educational choice organization, Leslie leads the EdChoice Legal Defense and Education Center for this nonpartisan, charitable nonprofit and engages with other national organizations to support school choice. She is a proven leader, advancing educational freedom and choice for all as a pathway to successful lives and a stronger society.
Hiner is an attorney with extensive state legislative and executive branch experience. In Indiana, she was the first woman chief of staff to the speaker of the house, counsel to the senate president pro tempore, and general counsel/elections deputy to the Secretary of State. She is also a former small business owner, and former litigator in private practice.
A founding board member of one of Indiana’s first charter schools, Leslie served as chairman of the board for the first several years, guiding the school’s growth from about 150 to over 1000 students. She was also directly involved in developing Indiana’s original charter school law, one of the best in the nation, and Indiana’s voucher law, the largest in the country to date.
Leslie is a member of the American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network, serves on the Schools That Can National Advisory Council, and is a Policy Advisor for The Heartland Institute. Leslie is a long-time member of the Federalist Society and a Lugar Series Excellence in Public Service alumna.
Hiner travels the country speaking on educational issues and testifying at public hearings. Recent engagements include the American Enterprise Institute With all deliberate speed: Brown v. Board of Education II 60 years later; Center for Urban Renewal and Education National Policy Summit, “Changing Policy to Change Lives”; National Conference of State Legislatures Summit debate, School Vouchers and Education Savings Accounts: Are They Constitutional; Network of Enlightened Women National Conference, Three Things You Need To Know About Education Policy; International Conference on School Choice and Reform, The Constitutionality of Educational Choice; 100 Black Men of Greater Dallas/Fort Worth, Project Soar’s Mobilizing the Village; Louisville Federalist Society Lawyers’ Chapter, Is School Choice Good Public Policy; American Conservative Union CPAC 2017.
She’s been cited in several publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, Forbes, US News & World Report, The Hill, Real Clear Policy, Federalist Society DocketWatch, National Review, The Federalist, Zman Magazine, Watchdog, and has appeared on EWTN News Nightly, Wall Street Journal Video Opinion Journal podcasts, David Webb Show on Sirius/XM, ChoiceMediaTV, The Heartland Institute podcasts and school choice events, The Morning Blaze, Issues in Education and many state level broadcasts.
A native of Ohio, she earned her Juris Doctorate from the University of Akron School of Law, her Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Wooster, and attended Rostad Teachers College as an exchange student in Sweden where she was a student teacher in grades 2 and 3. She and her husband reside in Indianapolis, and have two grown children.
Senior Fellow, American Federation for Children
Shaka Mitchell serves as a Senior Fellow for the American Federation for Children.
He brings experience from several high-performing charter school networks, including Rocketship Education and LEAD Public schools, that serve over 2,500 students in Nashville.
Shaka began his career in education as the Associate Director of Policy and Planning at the D.C.-based Center for Education Reform. He then led outreach efforts at the Institute for Justice, a constitutional law firm based in Arlington, VA.
He is an alumnus of Belmont University where he teaches American Government and Constitutional Law as an adjunct faculty member. He earned his Juris Doctorate from the Wake Forest University School of Law where he sits on the Board of Advisors for the Journal of Law and Policy. Shaka is a co-founder of MoreMarrowDonors.org, a non-profit committed to providing scholarships to bone marrow donors who are matches for patients with various blood diseases. Shaka is the Chair of the Tennessee State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
He is a member of the American Enterprise Institute’s Leadership Network and Aspen Institute Civil Society Fellowship. Shaka and his wife Stephanie are members of Edgefield Church in Nashville and are active in several non-profit organizations.
Partner, Schaerr Jaffe LLP
Gene Schaerr specializes in handling—and usually winning—civil appeals, writ proceedings and similar matters, both in appellate courts and in the law-focused proceedings at the trial-court or agency level that often determine success or failure on appeal. He has argued and won dozens of cases in a variety of forums—including the U.S. Supreme Court (where he has argued six cases), every federal circuit, and numerous federal district courts and state appellate courts. His win rate in the dozens of federal appeals he has argued in the past six years is over 75 percent.
He was a coordinator of Sidley Austin's appellate practice from 1993 until 2005, and from 2005 until 2014 was the chair of the nationwide appellate practice at Winston & Strawn—a practice he led to numerous recognitions in such publications as the Appellate Hot List. His personal practice successes have won him repeated recognition in such publications as Best Lawyers in Washington, D.C., Legal 500, D.C. Superlawyers, and Best Lawyers in America. In January 2014, Mr. Schaerr formed his own boutique litigation firm so that he could serve his clients without the conflicts and inefficiencies inherent in big-firm law practice.
Substantively, Mr. Schaerr's experience includes not only virtually every area of federal law, defamation, higher education law, immigration, insurance coverage, labor and employment, patent and trademark, privacy, product liability and warranty, statutory interpretation and tax.He has represented clients in virtually every sector, including automotive, communications, energy, financial services, health care, higher education, insurance, maritime, pharmaceuticals, technology and state and local government. He also teaches courses in Supreme Court litigation, religious freedom litigation and advanced litigation skills as an adjunct professor of law at the Brigham Young University law school.
Mr. Schaerr began law practice in 1987 following clerkships on the U.S. Supreme Court (for Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Antonin Scalia) and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (for then- Judge Kenneth Starr). He graduated in 1985 from the Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal on Regulation and Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal. From 1991 to 1993, he served in the White House as Associate Counsel to the President, where he had responsibility for a wide range of constitutional and administrative-law issues, including those involving economic regulation, higher education, separation of powers, federalism and religious freedom. He serves as Chairman of the Constitutional Sources Project, a digital resource providing free public access to historical materials relevant to the U.S. Constitution.
Visiting Scholar, Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government, University of Notre Dame
Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Former Director of Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019-2021, he served as the Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the Secretary of State. Peter studies and writes about, among other things, constitutional government, conservatism and progressivism, liberal education, national security and law, and Middle East politics. He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. He has edited seven volumes on American politics and political institutions. He is a contributor at RealClearPolitics, and has written hundreds of essays, articles, and reviews on many subjects for a variety of publications, including the American Political Science Review, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, National Review, the New Republic, the New York Post, the New York Sun, PJ Media, Policy Review, the Public Interest, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, the Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal. Peter holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University; an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, James Madison Program, Princeton University
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has several times been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of J.D. and M.T.S. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-one honorary doctorates. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law (both published by Oxford University Press), as well as The Clash of Orthodoxies and Conscience and Its Enemies (both published by ISI Books).
Director of the Program in Human Rights, Catholic University of America
William L. Saunders is Chair Emeritus of the Religious Liberties Practice Group of the Federalist Society. He is also a religious liberty and human rights scholar as well as director of the Center for Human rights at The Catholic University of America. He is Law Fellow with the Institute for Human Ecology, Professor and Director of the Program in Human Rights in the School of Arts & Sciences and Co-director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law. Before joining The Catholic University of America, Mr. Saunders served as Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel with Americans United for Life for ten years. From 1999 to 2009, he was Senior Fellow in Bioethics and Human Rights Counsel at the Family Research Council.
Mr. Saunders attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead scholarship. He obtained his degree in law from the Harvard Law School.
Mr. Saunders was featured in Harvard’s first Guide to Conservative Public Interest Law in 2003 and again in the 2008 edition. He served on Harvard’s Advisory Committee for its 2008 celebration of public interest law. A member of the Supreme Court bar, he has authored numerous legal briefs in state, federal, foreign, and international courts.
Mr. Saunders’ book, Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny, was published in 2019. His articles and book chapters have been published by the university presses of Harvard, Villanova, Brigham Young, Fordham, Georgetown, Houston, Scranton, and the Catholic University of America, as well as by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Freedom House, Greenhaven Press, Rowan & Littlefield, Praeger, St. Augustine’s, and Intervarsity press. He has given lectures and participated in debates at many colleges, universities, and law schools, including Princeton, Harvard, Georgetown, and Notre Dame. He delivered the annual J. Michael Miller Lecture at the University of St. Thomas (on international law) in February 2007, the annual R. Wayne Kraft Memorial Lecture (on bioethics) at DeSales University in February 2004 and the annual James Moore Lecture (on human rights violations in Sudan) at Millikin University in 1999. He has also lectured, and/or has been published, in many foreign countries, including Italy, Germany, Poland, Austria, Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Mexico, Qatar, Malaysia, Romania, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.
In addition to speaking and writing frequently on bioethics topics, Mr. Saunders has submitted testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as to UNESCO’s Committee on Bioethics, and has briefed Congressional staff and state legislatures. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.
Mr. Saunders has appeared often in the media, including BBC World News, CNN, Fox News, Vatican Radio, and National Public Radio. His articles on issues have appeared in a variety of journals, such as First Things, Human Events, Human Life Review, The Legal Times, Communio, The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy, Ethics & Medics, and Touchstone.
Mr. Saunders served on the official United States delegation to the UN Special Session on Children in 2001/02. In 2011, he was a speaker at an official briefing at the UN, addressing the topic, why euthanasia is not a human right.
In 2004, he served on the NGO Working Committee in connection with the Doha Intergovernmental Conference for the Family.
Mr. Saunders is Senior Fellow with the Religious Freedom Institute, and Affiliated Scholar with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a member of the boards of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, the International Right to Life Federation, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.
In 1999, Mr. Saunders founded Sudan Relief and Rescue, Inc., to aid the persecuted church in Sudan. He has worked for and written on behalf of the persecuted church for many years.
Partner, Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann LLC
Mr. Thomson concentrates his practice in white collar criminal defense, government investigations, and corporate compliance. He has tried over 50 criminal trials to verdict in federal and state courts, and has experience in appellate litigation. His practice also includes civil litigation and information security. Prior to joining Stone Pigman, Mr. Thomson had a 23 year career as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He served on special assignment with the National Security Agency, where he worked on matters involving information assurance and intelligence collection.
Prior to private practice, Mr. Thomson was recognized numerous times by government agencies, including a Special Commendation Award given by the U.S. Attorney General for completing the Justice Department's Leadership Excellence and Achievement Program; Special Commendation by FBI Director for outstanding performance for successful corruption prosecution after Hurricane Katrina; Special Award from the U.S. Postal Service for prosecution of corrupt employee; Special Award by New Orleans Police Department, ATF and U.S. Department of Justice for his contributions to Project Exile; and Special Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Drug Law Enforcement from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Secretary, Galen Institute
John Hoff, founding board member of the Galen Institute, has a unique background that combines both health care policy and legal expertise. He served as the Health Attaché of the United States Mission to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) from 2005-2009. While stationed in Paris, Mr. Hoff represented the U.S. Government on a broad range of issues of health and science policy on the international level, including intellectual property rights, health information technology, medical innovation, and comparative health systems data.
Prior to his work with UNESCO and the OECD, Mr. Hoff served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He was in charge of the Office of Disability, Aging, and Long Term Care Policy. He led the Office’s research on these issues, and also worked on additional policy initiatives such as reform of the medical malpractice litigation system, improvements in patient safety, and reform of the health care financing system.
Before joining the Government, Mr. Hoff practiced law for more than 30 years, specializing in health law and policy. He has published a number of articles and drafted legislation on health care issues, including the first bill introduced in Congress for market-based health care reform.
Mr. Hoff received his B.A. and LL.B. degrees from Harvard University. He is a member of the Bar of the District of Columbia and of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Health Law & Policy, Georgetown University
David A. Hyman, M.D., J.D., is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Health Law & Policy at Georgetown University. Professor Hyman focuses his research and writing on the regulation and financing of health care. He teaches or has taught health care regulation, civil procedure, insurance, medical malpractice, law & economics, professional responsibility, and tax policy.
While serving as Special Counsel to the Federal Trade Commission, Professor Hyman was principal author and project leader for the first joint report ever issued by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, “Improving Health Care: A Dose of Competition” (2004). He is also the author of Medicare Meets Mephistopheles, which was selected by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce/National Chamber Foundation as one of the top ten books of 2007, and the co-author (with Charles Silver) of Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care (2018). He has published widely in student-edited law reviews and peer-reviewed medical, health policy, law, and economics journals.
Robert L. Willett Family Professor of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law
Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, J.D., holds the Robert L. Willett Family Professorship of Law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. He is a coauthor of a casebook, Health Law, used widely throughout the United States in teaching health law and now in its sixth edition. He is also the author of Health Care at Risk, A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement, Health Care Coverage Determinations: An International Comparative Study, Readings in Comparative Health Law and Bioethics, and many articles and book chapters on health care regulation and comparative health law and policy. He has written numerous monographs on legal issues in health care reform for national organizations and blogs regularly for Health Affairs on regulatory issues. He is a consumer representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and a member of the Institute of Medicine.
James R. Dougherty Chair for Faculty Excellence, University of Texas School of Law
Bill Sage, both a medical doctor and a lawyer, and a leading expert in health law and policy, joined the UT Law faculty at the beginning of the fall semester in 2006. Sage holds the James R. Dougherty Chair for Faculty Excellence and teaches courses in health law and in regulation and public policy. Sage is also the vice provost for health affairs at UT-Austin.
Sage has edited two books, including Medical Malpractice and the U.S. Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and has written approximately 75 articles in legal, health policy, and medical publications. From 2002 through 2005, he was the principal investigator for the Project on Medical Liability in Pennsylvania funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 2002, Sage served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Rapid Advances in Health Care. In 1998, he received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 1993, he headed four working groups for the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform. He is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center on bioethics, and is a member of the editorial board of Health Affairs.
In 2002, Sage served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Rapid Advances in Health Care. In 1998, he received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In 1993, he headed four working groups for the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform. He is an elected fellow of the Hastings Center on bioethics, and is a member of the editorial board of Health Affairs.
Paula Stannard is a former deputy general counsel and acting general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where she oversaw the Food and Drug, Civil Rights and Legislation divisions of the 450-attorney HHS Office of the General Counsel and provided legal advice and counsel to senior HHS officials, including the Secretary of the department, on the issues arising in their respective areas.
At Alston & Bird, Paula advises clients on regulatory questions that arise out of the on-going health care reform effort and focuses her practice on HIPAA and health information technology (including certified EHR and meaningful use issues), food and drug and other regulatory issues in the health care sector. Her HHS experience provides clients substantive knowledge of, and experience in, FDA, HIPAA, e-health and health IT, federal health insurance regulation, patient safety, and public health preparedness and emergency response issues.
Paula received her J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1990, where she was an executive editor of the Stanford Law Review, and her B.A., magna cum laude, in political science and Latin from Amherst College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She clerked for the Honorable J.L. Edmondson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Stanford University
(J.D., 1990)
Amherst College
(B.A., 1987)
Managing Director, Alvarez & Marsal Healthcare Industry Group
With prior service as Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Tenet Healthcare, he brings more than 20 years of experience in addressing challenging healthcare issues in government and private industry.
Mr. Urbanowicz regularly advises boards of directors, senior management, investors and lenders of health care organizations facing significant regulatory, compliance, financial or operating challenges. His clients include healthcare providers, payors and suppliers.
Recent engagements include: serving as a federally-appointed hospital restructuring and safety monitor; compliance and operational improvements for publicly-traded and not-for-profit Medicare Advantage plans, Medicare Prescription Drug Plans (PDP) and Medicaid managed care companies; renegotiating of government debt for a major hospital system; restructuring advisory services to the Medicaid program of a large state; numerous internal and government investigations involving healthcare providers including: academic health systems, medical device companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, long term care hospital companies, hospice providers, dental services companies and disease management companies.
Mr. Urbanowicz also serves on the board of directors of Maxim Healthcare Services, one of the nation’s largest home health services companies, and chairs the company’s compliance committee.
As Deputy General Counsel of HHS, from 2001 to 2003, Mr. Urbanowicz served as the senior legal adviser to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on significant federal healthcare policy issues including Medicare and Medicaid provider payment and fraud and abuse enforcement policy. He was part of the team that drafted the historic Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003.
During his tenure at Tenet, Mr. Urbanowicz was responsible for successfully resolving several major federal criminal investigations and civil lawsuits facing Tenet by the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the HHS Office of Inspector General. Prior to his government service, he was a partner in the law firm of Locke, Liddell & Sapp.
Mr. Urbanowicz earned a bachelor of arts’ degree and a Juris Doctor degree from Tulane University. He is admitted to the bars of the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Louisiana Supreme Court, and is a member of the American Law Institute.
Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Former Director of Policy Planning Staff, U.S. Department of State
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019-2021, he served as the Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the Secretary of State. Peter studies and writes about, among other things, constitutional government, conservatism and progressivism, liberal education, national security and law, and Middle East politics. He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. He has edited seven volumes on American politics and political institutions. He is a contributor at RealClearPolitics, and has written hundreds of essays, articles, and reviews on many subjects for a variety of publications, including the American Political Science Review, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, National Review, the New Republic, the New York Post, the New York Sun, PJ Media, Policy Review, the Public Interest, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Weekly Standard, the Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal. Peter holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University; an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, James Madison Program, Princeton University
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has several times been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of J.D. and M.T.S. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-one honorary doctorates. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law (both published by Oxford University Press), as well as The Clash of Orthodoxies and Conscience and Its Enemies (both published by ISI Books).
Director of the Program in Human Rights, Catholic University of America
William L. Saunders is Chair Emeritus of the Religious Liberties Practice Group of the Federalist Society. He is also a religious liberty and human rights scholar as well as director of the Center for Human rights at The Catholic University of America. He is Law Fellow with the Institute for Human Ecology, Professor and Director of the Program in Human Rights in the School of Arts & Sciences and Co-director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law. Before joining The Catholic University of America, Mr. Saunders served as Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel with Americans United for Life for ten years. From 1999 to 2009, he was Senior Fellow in Bioethics and Human Rights Counsel at the Family Research Council.
Mr. Saunders attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead scholarship. He obtained his degree in law from the Harvard Law School.
Mr. Saunders was featured in Harvard’s first Guide to Conservative Public Interest Law in 2003 and again in the 2008 edition. He served on Harvard’s Advisory Committee for its 2008 celebration of public interest law. A member of the Supreme Court bar, he has authored numerous legal briefs in state, federal, foreign, and international courts.
Mr. Saunders’ book, Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny, was published in 2019. His articles and book chapters have been published by the university presses of Harvard, Villanova, Brigham Young, Fordham, Georgetown, Houston, Scranton, and the Catholic University of America, as well as by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Freedom House, Greenhaven Press, Rowan & Littlefield, Praeger, St. Augustine’s, and Intervarsity press. He has given lectures and participated in debates at many colleges, universities, and law schools, including Princeton, Harvard, Georgetown, and Notre Dame. He delivered the annual J. Michael Miller Lecture at the University of St. Thomas (on international law) in February 2007, the annual R. Wayne Kraft Memorial Lecture (on bioethics) at DeSales University in February 2004 and the annual James Moore Lecture (on human rights violations in Sudan) at Millikin University in 1999. He has also lectured, and/or has been published, in many foreign countries, including Italy, Germany, Poland, Austria, Spain, Greece, Slovakia, Mexico, Qatar, Malaysia, Romania, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.
In addition to speaking and writing frequently on bioethics topics, Mr. Saunders has submitted testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as to UNESCO’s Committee on Bioethics, and has briefed Congressional staff and state legislatures. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.
Mr. Saunders has appeared often in the media, including BBC World News, CNN, Fox News, Vatican Radio, and National Public Radio. His articles on issues have appeared in a variety of journals, such as First Things, Human Events, Human Life Review, The Legal Times, Communio, The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy, Ethics & Medics, and Touchstone.
Mr. Saunders served on the official United States delegation to the UN Special Session on Children in 2001/02. In 2011, he was a speaker at an official briefing at the UN, addressing the topic, why euthanasia is not a human right.
In 2004, he served on the NGO Working Committee in connection with the Doha Intergovernmental Conference for the Family.
Mr. Saunders is Senior Fellow with the Religious Freedom Institute, and Affiliated Scholar with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine. He is President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars and a member of the boards of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, the International Right to Life Federation, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.
In 1999, Mr. Saunders founded Sudan Relief and Rescue, Inc., to aid the persecuted church in Sudan. He has worked for and written on behalf of the persecuted church for many years.
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