PhD, Professor of Finance, University of Colorado
Sanjai Bhagat, PhD, is professor of finance at University of Colorado. Previously, he has taught finance at Princeton University, and University of Chicago. He has deep expertise in finance and investments, cybersecurity governance, IPO valuation, energy and ESG, and M&A. He has advised the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, and U.S. Department of Treasury on finance and corporate governance. He has served as a board member of a venture capital company focused on cutting-edge technologies in life sciences. Currently, he is serving as an Independent Board Member of an enterprise-level application software company.
Senior Resident Scholar, Institute of Government Studies, UC Berkeley
Steven Hayward is currently senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, and a visiting lecturer at Berkeley Law School. He was previously the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Public Policy, and was the inaugural visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2013-14. From 2002 to 2012 he was the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, and has been senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco since 1991.
He writes frequently for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Claremont Review of Books, and other publications. The author of six books including a two-volume chronicle of Reagan and his times entitled The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980, and The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989, and the Almanac of Environmental Trends. His most recent book is Patriotism is Not Enough: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, and the Arguments That Redefined American Conservatism.
Colorado House of Representatives
Robert E. Witwer represents District 25 in the Colorado House of Representatives. He servers on the House Education Committee and the Joint Education and Local Government Committees, and he has a special interest in public lands. He has practiced with the national law firm of Hogan and Hartson and as legal counsel for the Colorado Republican Party and is Assistant General Counsel to Coors Brewing Co. His expertise includes campaign finance and election law.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
Patrick J. Bumatay was confirmed as a U.S. Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December 2019. He is based in San Diego, California.
Prior to his appointment, Judge Bumatay served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, where he was a member of the Appellate and Narcotics Sections. He also served as a Counselor to the Attorney General on criminal law issues, including on national opioid strategy and combating transnational organized crime.
Judge Bumatay has also worked in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, the Office of the Associate Attorney General, and the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. Judge Bumatay has twice received the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award.
Judge Bumatay previously worked as an associate at Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, and Bohrer in New York, New York. Judge Bumatay clerked for the Honorable Timothy M. Tymkovich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Honorable Sandra L. Townes of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Judge Bumatay earned his B.A., cum laude, from Yale University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Dean, Widener University Commonwealth Law School
André Douglas Pond Cummings is the incoming Dean of Widener University Commonwealth Law School. Dean cummings currently serves as associate dean for faculty development and the Charles C. Baum distinguished professor of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s William H. Bowen School of Law. During his time at the Bowen School of Law, cummings served for five years on the university Diversity Counsel and three years on the chancellor’s race and ethnicity advisory committee. Prior to joining the Bowen School of Law, cummings taught at the West Virginia University College of Law and clerked for Associate Chief Justice Christine M. Durham of the Utah Supreme Court and Chief Judge Joseph W. Hatchett of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Dean cummings is a graduate of Brigham Young University and Howard University School of Law.
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.
General Counsel, Saronic Technologies
Tobi Young is the General Counsel of Saronic Technologies. Her responsibilities include managing global legal affairs, regulatory compliance, litigation, risk management, and government security, and corporate governance.
Tobi brings over 20 years of experience with sophisticated legal, regulatory, and compliance issues through leadership roles in all three branches of the federal government and in Fortune 500 companies. Among other governmental positions, she has been an attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice and in the Office of the White House Counsel; a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch; and a press secretary for Congressman J.C. Watts. Tobi also currently serves as the Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee on the Halliburton Board of Directors (NYSE: HAL).
Tobi grew up in Oklahoma and is a proud member of the Chickasaw Nation. She recently became the youngest inductee into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame. Tobi now lives in Austin with her husband Evan, a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court, and their daughter Romilly.
PhD, Professor of Finance, University of Colorado
Sanjai Bhagat, PhD, is professor of finance at University of Colorado. Previously, he has taught finance at Princeton University, and University of Chicago. He has deep expertise in finance and investments, cybersecurity governance, IPO valuation, energy and ESG, and M&A. He has advised the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, and U.S. Department of Treasury on finance and corporate governance. He has served as a board member of a venture capital company focused on cutting-edge technologies in life sciences. Currently, he is serving as an Independent Board Member of an enterprise-level application software company.
Kathleen Q. Abernathy recently returned to Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP as special counsel. She was previously elected to the Board of Directors of Frontier Communications as an independent director in 2006 following her term as a Commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. In 2010 she joined the company as Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President, Regulatory and Governmental Affairs. Prior to her term as an FCC Commissioner, Ms. Abernathy worked for a number of different telecommunications companies and law firms. She has received numerous awards in recognition of her professional accomplishments and has taught as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center and Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. She received her B.S. from Marquette University and her J.D. from Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.
Former CEO, Vascular Solutions
Howard Root is the recently-retired Chief Executive Officer of Vascular Solutions, Inc., a company he founded in 1997, took public in 2000, and grew into a worldwide medical device company that he sold to Teleflex for $1 billion in February 2017. Over the company’s 20 years, Howard led Vascular Solutions in inventing, developing and launching over 100 new medical devices that are used daily to improve the lives of patients suffering from cardiovascular disease. In 2014, Vascular Solutions and Howard were indicted on felony charges alleging the company’s salespeople had promoted off-label an FDA-cleared medical device that made up only 0.1% of the company’s sales and never harmed a single patient. After surviving an arduous legal process, with 121 attorneys charging $25 million in legal fees, in February 2016 the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all charges, even though the defense didn’t call a single witness to testify in the four-week trial.
VP for Policy & Director of Technology Studies, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Wayne Crews is VP for Policy & Director of Technology Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a Cato Institute alum. A one-time Libertarian candidate for South Carolina state senate, he is widely published, contributes to Forbes.com, and authors the annual Ten Thousand Commandments, which the Wall Street Journal called "the best measure of the overall regulatory burden." Wayne also compiles the Tip of the Costberg report on gov't regulatory costs, and catalogs "regulatory dark matter."
A frequent speaker, Wayne has appeared at venues including the DVD Awards Showcase in Hollywood, the National Academies, the Future of Music Policy Summit, the Consumer Electronics Show, European Commission-sponsored conferences and the Spanish Ministry of Justice. He has testified before Congress numerous times.
While not a lawyer, Wayne's work is cited in hundreds of law reviews, journals, and books. A dad of five, he can still do a handstand on a skateboard and enjoys custom motorcycles, the beach, and the family farm. He is a member of Omicron Delta Epsilon economics honor society.
Wayne is co-editor of the books Who Rules the Net?: Internet Governance and Jurisdiction, and Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property In the Information Age. He is co-author of What’s Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism, and a contributing author to others.
TV appearances include Fox, CNN, ABC, CNBC and NewsHour, and radio such as NPR; Wayne's reform ideas have been profiled in the Washington Post, Forbes and Investor’s Business Daily.
Wayne created CEI's c:\spin tech newsletter series, and co-created CEI's OnPoint policy series and Cato's TechKnowledge newsletter (which introduced "The Libertarian Vision for Telecom and High-Technology" with Adam Thierer, which helped inspire the 2012 Declaration of Internet Freedom). He coined the term "Splinternet" in Forbes in 2001 to underscore alternatives to government regulation of the Internet.
Is There a Business Case for Racial and Ethnic Diversity for Corporate Leadership?
Litigation Practice Group: Diversity and Modern Litigation
Patrick J. Bumatay, andré douglas pond cummings, Roger Severino, Tobi Young
CLE credit for this event is available at On-Demand CLE. In recent years, the legal profession...
Is There a Business Case for Racial and Ethnic Diversity for Corporate Leadership?
Sanjai Bhagat
An influential 2015 McKinsey study claims a business case for racial and ethnic diversity in...
Topics
Docket Watch: Coloradans for a Better Future v. Campaign Integrity Watchdog
In 2012, Colorado’s Republican voters faced a choice in the campaign for Colorado University’s Board...
How to Regulate the Internet
Kathleen Q. Abernathy
Note from the Editor: This article traces the history of the FCC’s approach to regulating...
Cardiac Arrest: A Cautionary Tale
Howard Root
Howard Root started Vascular Solutions, a medical device company, from scratch. Fifteen years later, his...
Laws, Regulations, and "Regulatory Dark Matter"
Wayne Crews
Congress passes and the President signs several dozen laws every year. Meanwhile, federal departments and...
Judicial Nominees & the District of Colorado
Denver, ColoradoReflections on Being the Conservative Scholar in Residence At CU
Denver, ColoradoAre Political Parties Dead?
Denver, Colorado