Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame Law School
Professor Richard W. Garnett teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, the First Amendment, and law and religion. He is a leading authority on questions and debates regarding religious freedom and church-state relations, and is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society.
Garnett clerked for the late Chief Justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist, and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Duke University in 1990. He joined the faculty in 1999 after practicing law in Washington, D.C. with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.
Partner, Schaerr | Jaffe LLP
Erik Jaffe has been involved in appeals on a broad range of legal issues, including First Amendment challenges to campaign finance reform, Commerce Clause challenges to Health Care Reform and other federal legislation, Equal Protection Clause challenges to affirmative action in education, First Amendment challenges to school vouchers, Fifth Amendment challenges to takings of property, Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun ownership, and a wide variety of cases involving patents, copyrights, ERISA, securities fraud, federal preemption, environmental regulation, and other state and federal constitutional and statutory matters. He has represented businesses and non-profit groups, Judges, Senators, former government officials, Nobel Prize winners, and a broad cross-section of private individuals. Mr. Jaffe has been involved in over 120 Supreme Court matters, including filing over 30 cert. petitions, representing half-a-dozen parties on the merits, and filing over 70 amicus briefs at both the cert. and merits stages.
A 1990 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Mr. Jaffe was a law clerk to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1990 to 1991. Following that clerkship he spent five years in litigation practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly. In the summer of 1996 he left Williams & Connolly to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. At the end of that clerkship he started his own practice, and he was a sole practitioner from 1997 to 2018. He joined the firm of Schaerr | Jaffe LLP in 2018.
University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Michael P. Moreland was appointed University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy at Villanova University in 2017. Professor Moreland joined the Villanova faculty in 2006 and served as Vice Dean from 2012 to 2015. His research is primarily in the areas of torts, law and religion, constitutional law, and Catholic social thought, and he regularly teaches Torts, First Amendment, seminars in law and religion, and undergraduate courses in ethics.
Professor Moreland is the co-editor of Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021), and his most recent publications include: “The Authority of Tradition: John Henry Newman and Legal Theory” in Christianity and the Making of Irish Law (Routledge, 2025); “Christianity and Torts” in The Oxford Handbook on Christianity and Law, (Oxford University Press, 2023); “Germaneness and Religious Liberty” in the Notre Dame Law Review (2023); “Contingency and Contestation in Christianity and Liberalism” in the Notre Dame Law Review (2023); “Friendship as the Primary Purpose of Law” in The American Journal of Jurisprudence 279 (2022); and “The Moral of Torts” (with Jeffrey Pojanowski) in Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021).
Professor Moreland was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture from 2015 to 2017. He was the Forbes Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program during academic year 2010-11. He has served as the project leader for grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation. He serves as the Chair of the Federalist Society’s Religious Liberties Practice Group Executive Committee and the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California.
Professor Moreland received his BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, his MA and PhD in theological ethics from Boston College, and his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. Following law school, Professor Moreland clerked for the Honorable Paul J. Kelly Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC, where he represented clients in First Amendment, professional liability, and products liability matters. Before coming to Villanova, he served as Associate Director for Domestic Policy at the White House under President George W. Bush, where he worked on a range of legal policy issues, including criminal justice, immigration, civil rights, and liability reform.
Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law; Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law; Director, Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, University of Virginia School of Law
Micah Schwartzman is the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law, a Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law, and director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy at the University of Virginia School of Law. Schwartzman’s scholarship focuses on law and religion, jurisprudence, and constitutional law. He co-edited The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press) and is co-authoring a forthcoming casebook on Constitutional Law and Religion.
Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Professor Friedman is one of the country’s leading authorities on constitutional law and the federal courts. He is a prolific scholar, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a wide variety of courses including Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Criminal Procedure. He writes extensively about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction and judicial behavior. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation’s top law and peer-edited reviews. He is the author of widely-recognized The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009), which examines the history of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court, from 1776 to the present. Along with his co-author Stephen Burbank, Friedman co-edited and contributed to Judicial Independence at the Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which questions common assumptions about the nature of judicial independence and how it can be protected. The book has been cited and relied upon countless times by scholars and policymakers alike. Professor Friedman is a frequent contributor to the nation's leading journals, both on-line and print. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Politico andThe New Republic, among others.
Professor Friedman is a frequent speaker at events of all sorts. Given the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Professor Friedman regularly appears at conferences in law, political science and history. He is a founder and co-convener of the “roughly biennial” Constitutional Theory Conference. He organizes many multi-disciplinary conferences, including one on Modeling Law, and another – done under the auspices of the American Constitution Society – on Reconstruction: America’s Second Founding. He presents papers regularly at home and abroad. He has been a visiting scholar and lecturer at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur law Justice Constitutionnelle Aix-en-Provence, Sciences-Po in Aix-en-Provence, and Hong Kong University.
Professor Friedman regularly serves as a litigator or litigation consultant in a variety of matters in the federal and state courts. He has represented a wide range of clients, both public and private. Notably, he represents both civil liberties claimants and state and local governments. He has been active in the areas of reproductive rights, the jurisdictional allocation of cases between the federal and state courts, and the proper scope of the federal government’s commerce power. He has filed a number of amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Actively engaged in a range of important service activities, at NYU Professor Friedman created the Academic Careers Program and founded and is now co-director of the Furman Academic Program. Both programs are dedicated to preparing young scholars for academic careers. In the past he was extensively involved with the American Judicature Society, was President of the Tennessee Civil Liberties Union, served on the Board of the State and Local Legal Center, and on the steering committee of New York University’s Institute for Law and Society. He recently completed a term as Vice Dean of New York University School of Law.
Professor Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago and received his law degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and also worked as a litigation associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Washington D.C. He was a professor at Vanderbilt Law School before joining the NYU faculty in 2000. In 1995 he won the Clarence Darrow Award from the ACLU of Tennessee for his work in defense of civil liberties.
J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 1982
B.A., University of Chicago, 1978
Adjunct Professor, Fordham University School of Law
Ms. McAvoy is an attorney, a former federal prosecutor and former in-house counsel for financial institutions. She specializes in Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing issues. She is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and heads Fordham’s Adjunct Faculty Committee. Ms. McAvoy has been politically active as well, including having run for the position of Comptroller of the City of New York as Rudy Giuliani’s running mate. She also was on John McCain’s NY Steering Committee and was Co-Chair of NY Women for McCain during his most recent presidential bid.
She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from St. John’s University in 1984, where she graduated summa cum laude as valedictorian and was NYS debate champion. Ms. McAvoy received a Juris Doctor degree from Fordham Law School in 1987 where she participated as a member of its National Moot Court team.
Ms. McAvoy began practicing law as a litigation associate at Mudge Rose Guthrie & Ferdon. After that she became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the EDNY’s Civil and Criminal Divisions, where she received awards from both the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She practiced in US District Court, the US Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit, Surrogate’s Court and US Bankruptcy Court. Civil cases she handled included employment discrimination, forfeitures, medical malpractice, suits brought against government employees, Social Security disability, personal injury and tax cases. The criminal matters she handled included money laundering, bank robbery, mail fraud, illegal weapons sales, insurance fraud, credit card fraud, Food Stamp fraud, counterfeiting and narcotics violations.
After leaving the US Attorney’s Office, Ms. McAvoy became Senior Attorney at Morgan Stanley, where she was in charge of anti-money laundering prevention efforts and the reporting of suspicious activity. She also handled insider trading matters, fraud issues, general securities litigation and criminal matters. She received an award from the U.S. Secret Service for her work and as a member of the Securities Industry Ad Hoc Bank Secrecy Act Group she assisted the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board in drafting suspicious activity regulations relating to the securities industry.
Ms. McAvoy thereafter joined Citigroup, where she was Senior Legal Counsel for Citigroup Corporate Security and Investigative Services, providing legal advice on fraud issues, corporate security, investigations and anti-money laundering compliance for Citigroup’s businesses, including Citibank, Travelers Insurance, Salomon Smith Barney and Primerica Financial Services.
Since 2000 Ms. McAvoy has been doing private consulting work for the financial industry. She has conducted extensive training for banks, securities firms, the NASD and law enforcement. She has also participated in internal corporate investigations and look-backs at financial institutions, has helped institutions develop appropriate policies and procedures and has acted as an expert consulting witness for law firms. She also continues to teach at Fordham Law School as an adjunct professor and remains active in politics.
Ms. McAvoy has provided legal, political and business commentary on a variety of television networks and on radio. She is a regular commentator on foxnews.com’s Strategy Room and has appeared on various programs on the Fox Cable News Channel including The O’Reilly Factor. She is a legal contributor for the Grinder Show on NY 970 The Apple, a nationally broadcast radio show which also streams live on the internet.
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New York, New York