Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Adam Paul Laxalt is a partner at Cooper & Kirk which he joined in March 2019. Mr. Laxalt served as Nevada’s 33rd Attorney General from 2015-2019. Mr. Laxalt graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University and also graduated from Georgetown University Law Center. He is a former Navy and Iraq War veteran. Mr. Laxalt also served as an Assistant Professor of Law at the U.S. Naval Academy.
As Nevada’s Attorney General and top law-enforcement officer, Mr. Laxalt supervised all criminal and civil matters for Nevada’s largest law office. He provided strategic direction and supervision of almost 400 employees, thousands of legal matters, and nearly 50 trials. Mr. Laxalt served as chief legal counsel for the state of Nevada, as well as to Constitutional Officers, state agencies, boards, and commissions. He managed approximately $1.2 billion in potential civil liabilities for the state.
As a former member of the military, Laxalt’s support of service members culminated in the creation of the Office of Military Legal Assistance, a first-of-its-kind program that provides Nevada’s military members with free legal representation. The program was recently named a “Best Practice Program” by the Department of Defense with a recommendation for duplication in states throughout the country, and to date, has helped military personnel and veterans handle over 210 pro bono matters.
Consistent with his commitment to defending our nation’s constitutional principles and protecting the important role of the States in our federalist system of government, Laxalt created Nevada’s first ever Federalism Unit within the Attorney General’s Office. To protect the interests of Nevadans, the Federalism Unit has challenged multiple occasions of unlawful federal overreach, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waters of the United States Rule, the Bureau of Land Management’s Sage Grouse Plan, and other instances of unilateral federal executive orders. The Unit has also filed friend of the court briefs on many important issues including public roads, Environmental Protection Agency overreach, federal interference with Nevada’s criminal justice system and Second Amendment issues.
Co-Chairman, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Leonard is Co-Chairman and former Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, joining the organization over 25 years ago. Since that time he has been instrumental in helping the organization top 70,000, focusing on the growth of lawyers membership, operations and activities advancing limited, constitutional government. In addition to his work at the Society, Leonard has advised President Trump on judicial selection, assisted with the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh Supreme Court selection and confirmation process, and served as a member of the transition team. He also organized the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations. Leonard was appointed by President George W. Bush to three terms to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as chairman. He was also a U.S. Delegate to the UN Council and UN Commission on Human Rights during the Bush Administration. Leonard was the recipient of the 2009 Bradley Prize, along with the other founders and directors of the Federalist Society, for his work in advancing freedom and the rule of law. He is the coeditor of Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, as well as the author of opinion editorials in the New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Leonard holds degrees from Cornell University and Cornell Law School. He presently resides in Northern Virginia, where he and his wife Sally have raised their seven children.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2013–18, he served on the United States Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, served as Acting Chair.
He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and previously taught as an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University.
He served as the 45th Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004. When he took office, he was the youngest attorney general in the nation. In his reelection, he received the highest percentage of votes of any statewide candidate.
He graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and was editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW THIRD, CONFLICT OF LAWS. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, THE LAW OF JUDICIAL PRECEDENT. He has published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Yale Law & Policy Review, George Mason Law Review, Florida Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Case Western Reserve Law Review, and Tulane Law Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and USA Today. He has debated at National Lawyers’ Conventions of the Federalist Society (including on National Public Radio) and at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom. And he is listed among several “widely admired judicial writers” in Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
He is a member of the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame and has received the Defender of the Constitution Award from the Heritage Foundation, the Jurist of the Year Award from the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the St. Thomas More Award from the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta. Judge Pryor is also a proud member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Adam Paul Laxalt is a partner at Cooper & Kirk which he joined in March 2019. Mr. Laxalt served as Nevada’s 33rd Attorney General from 2015-2019. Mr. Laxalt graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University and also graduated from Georgetown University Law Center. He is a former Navy and Iraq War veteran. Mr. Laxalt also served as an Assistant Professor of Law at the U.S. Naval Academy.
As Nevada’s Attorney General and top law-enforcement officer, Mr. Laxalt supervised all criminal and civil matters for Nevada’s largest law office. He provided strategic direction and supervision of almost 400 employees, thousands of legal matters, and nearly 50 trials. Mr. Laxalt served as chief legal counsel for the state of Nevada, as well as to Constitutional Officers, state agencies, boards, and commissions. He managed approximately $1.2 billion in potential civil liabilities for the state.
As a former member of the military, Laxalt’s support of service members culminated in the creation of the Office of Military Legal Assistance, a first-of-its-kind program that provides Nevada’s military members with free legal representation. The program was recently named a “Best Practice Program” by the Department of Defense with a recommendation for duplication in states throughout the country, and to date, has helped military personnel and veterans handle over 210 pro bono matters.
Consistent with his commitment to defending our nation’s constitutional principles and protecting the important role of the States in our federalist system of government, Laxalt created Nevada’s first ever Federalism Unit within the Attorney General’s Office. To protect the interests of Nevadans, the Federalism Unit has challenged multiple occasions of unlawful federal overreach, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waters of the United States Rule, the Bureau of Land Management’s Sage Grouse Plan, and other instances of unilateral federal executive orders. The Unit has also filed friend of the court briefs on many important issues including public roads, Environmental Protection Agency overreach, federal interference with Nevada’s criminal justice system and Second Amendment issues.
Co-Chairman, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Leonard is Co-Chairman and former Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, joining the organization over 25 years ago. Since that time he has been instrumental in helping the organization top 70,000, focusing on the growth of lawyers membership, operations and activities advancing limited, constitutional government. In addition to his work at the Society, Leonard has advised President Trump on judicial selection, assisted with the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh Supreme Court selection and confirmation process, and served as a member of the transition team. He also organized the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations. Leonard was appointed by President George W. Bush to three terms to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as chairman. He was also a U.S. Delegate to the UN Council and UN Commission on Human Rights during the Bush Administration. Leonard was the recipient of the 2009 Bradley Prize, along with the other founders and directors of the Federalist Society, for his work in advancing freedom and the rule of law. He is the coeditor of Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, as well as the author of opinion editorials in the New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Leonard holds degrees from Cornell University and Cornell Law School. He presently resides in Northern Virginia, where he and his wife Sally have raised their seven children.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2013–18, he served on the United States Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, served as Acting Chair.
He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and previously taught as an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University.
He served as the 45th Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004. When he took office, he was the youngest attorney general in the nation. In his reelection, he received the highest percentage of votes of any statewide candidate.
He graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and was editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW THIRD, CONFLICT OF LAWS. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, THE LAW OF JUDICIAL PRECEDENT. He has published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Yale Law & Policy Review, George Mason Law Review, Florida Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Case Western Reserve Law Review, and Tulane Law Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and USA Today. He has debated at National Lawyers’ Conventions of the Federalist Society (including on National Public Radio) and at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom. And he is listed among several “widely admired judicial writers” in Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
He is a member of the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame and has received the Defender of the Constitution Award from the Heritage Foundation, the Jurist of the Year Award from the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the St. Thomas More Award from the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta. Judge Pryor is also a proud member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
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).
George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.
Former President & CEO, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Eugene B. Meyer, former President and CEO of the Federalist Society, has served as Executive Director, CEO, and/or President of the organization for more than 40 years. He is responsible for shepherding the organization from a small group of law students to a community of 90,000 lawyers, law students, academics, judges, and others interested in the rule of law. The Society now includes a Student Chapter at nearly every ABA-accredited law school in the country and Lawyers Chapters in 220 major cities across the nation. Gene earned his B.A. in history at Yale in 1975 and his M.A. in political science from the London School of Economics in 1976. Gene currently serves on the boards of the U.S. Chess Center, the Holman Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the advisory board of the Adam Smith Society. He holds the title of International Chess Master.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2013–18, he served on the United States Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, served as Acting Chair.
He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and previously taught as an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University.
He served as the 45th Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004. When he took office, he was the youngest attorney general in the nation. In his reelection, he received the highest percentage of votes of any statewide candidate.
He graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and was editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW THIRD, CONFLICT OF LAWS. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, THE LAW OF JUDICIAL PRECEDENT. He has published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Yale Law & Policy Review, George Mason Law Review, Florida Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Case Western Reserve Law Review, and Tulane Law Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and USA Today. He has debated at National Lawyers’ Conventions of the Federalist Society (including on National Public Radio) and at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom. And he is listed among several “widely admired judicial writers” in Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
He is a member of the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame and has received the Defender of the Constitution Award from the Heritage Foundation, the Jurist of the Year Award from the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the St. Thomas More Award from the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta. Judge Pryor is also a proud member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC
Adam Paul Laxalt is a partner at Cooper & Kirk which he joined in March 2019. Mr. Laxalt served as Nevada’s 33rd Attorney General from 2015-2019. Mr. Laxalt graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University and also graduated from Georgetown University Law Center. He is a former Navy and Iraq War veteran. Mr. Laxalt also served as an Assistant Professor of Law at the U.S. Naval Academy.
As Nevada’s Attorney General and top law-enforcement officer, Mr. Laxalt supervised all criminal and civil matters for Nevada’s largest law office. He provided strategic direction and supervision of almost 400 employees, thousands of legal matters, and nearly 50 trials. Mr. Laxalt served as chief legal counsel for the state of Nevada, as well as to Constitutional Officers, state agencies, boards, and commissions. He managed approximately $1.2 billion in potential civil liabilities for the state.
As a former member of the military, Laxalt’s support of service members culminated in the creation of the Office of Military Legal Assistance, a first-of-its-kind program that provides Nevada’s military members with free legal representation. The program was recently named a “Best Practice Program” by the Department of Defense with a recommendation for duplication in states throughout the country, and to date, has helped military personnel and veterans handle over 210 pro bono matters.
Consistent with his commitment to defending our nation’s constitutional principles and protecting the important role of the States in our federalist system of government, Laxalt created Nevada’s first ever Federalism Unit within the Attorney General’s Office. To protect the interests of Nevadans, the Federalism Unit has challenged multiple occasions of unlawful federal overreach, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waters of the United States Rule, the Bureau of Land Management’s Sage Grouse Plan, and other instances of unilateral federal executive orders. The Unit has also filed friend of the court briefs on many important issues including public roads, Environmental Protection Agency overreach, federal interference with Nevada’s criminal justice system and Second Amendment issues.
Co-Chairman, The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies
Leonard is Co-Chairman and former Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, joining the organization over 25 years ago. Since that time he has been instrumental in helping the organization top 70,000, focusing on the growth of lawyers membership, operations and activities advancing limited, constitutional government. In addition to his work at the Society, Leonard has advised President Trump on judicial selection, assisted with the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh Supreme Court selection and confirmation process, and served as a member of the transition team. He also organized the outside coalition efforts in support of the Roberts and Alito U.S. Supreme Court confirmations. Leonard was appointed by President George W. Bush to three terms to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as chairman. He was also a U.S. Delegate to the UN Council and UN Commission on Human Rights during the Bush Administration. Leonard was the recipient of the 2009 Bradley Prize, along with the other founders and directors of the Federalist Society, for his work in advancing freedom and the rule of law. He is the coeditor of Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House, as well as the author of opinion editorials in the New York Times,The Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Leonard holds degrees from Cornell University and Cornell Law School. He presently resides in Northern Virginia, where he and his wife Sally have raised their seven children.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2013–18, he served on the United States Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, served as Acting Chair.
He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and previously taught as an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University.
He served as the 45th Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004. When he took office, he was the youngest attorney general in the nation. In his reelection, he received the highest percentage of votes of any statewide candidate.
He graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and was editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW THIRD, CONFLICT OF LAWS. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, THE LAW OF JUDICIAL PRECEDENT. He has published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Yale Law & Policy Review, George Mason Law Review, Florida Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Case Western Reserve Law Review, and Tulane Law Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and USA Today. He has debated at National Lawyers’ Conventions of the Federalist Society (including on National Public Radio) and at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom. And he is listed among several “widely admired judicial writers” in Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
He is a member of the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame and has received the Defender of the Constitution Award from the Heritage Foundation, the Jurist of the Year Award from the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the St. Thomas More Award from the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta. Judge Pryor is also a proud member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Co-Director, Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State
Adam J. White is the Laurence H. Silberman Chair in Constitutional Governance and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Supreme Court and the administrative state. Concurrently, he codirects the Antonin Scalia Law School’s C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State.
Mr. White practiced constitutional and administrative law, particularly in the regulation of energy and financial markets. He started his legal career as a law clerk for Judge David B. Sentelle at the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Mr. White has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Affairs, Commentary, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and Notre Dame Law Review, among other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Yale Journal on Regulation’s Notice and Comment blog, and for many years, he was one of the Weekly Standard’s lead writers on constitutional law and the Supreme Court.
Mr. White has testified often before Congress, including before the Senate’s Committees on the Judiciary; Commerce, Science, and Transportation; and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and before the House’s Judiciary and Financial Services Committees. In 2018, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary called him to testify in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to advise senators on Kavanaugh’s approach to administrative law.
In 2021, he served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, where he criticized “Court packing” and other efforts to restructure the Supreme Court. In 2017, he was appointed to serve on the Administrative Conference of the United States. He also serves on the leadership council for the American Bar Association’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice Section, which he will chair in 2023–24. Before joining AEI, he was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Mr. White has a JD from Harvard Law School and a bachelor of business administration from the College of Business at the University of Iowa.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2013–18, he served on the United States Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, served as Acting Chair.
He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and previously taught as an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University.
He served as the 45th Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004. When he took office, he was the youngest attorney general in the nation. In his reelection, he received the highest percentage of votes of any statewide candidate.
He graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and was editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW THIRD, CONFLICT OF LAWS. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, THE LAW OF JUDICIAL PRECEDENT. He has published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Yale Law & Policy Review, George Mason Law Review, Florida Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Case Western Reserve Law Review, and Tulane Law Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and USA Today. He has debated at National Lawyers’ Conventions of the Federalist Society (including on National Public Radio) and at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom. And he is listed among several “widely admired judicial writers” in Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
He is a member of the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame and has received the Defender of the Constitution Award from the Heritage Foundation, the Jurist of the Year Award from the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the St. Thomas More Award from the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta. Judge Pryor is also a proud member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, Yale Law School
Kate Stith, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law at Yale Law School, teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, Professor Stith was an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where she prosecuted white-collar and organized-crime cases. Professor Stith is serving or has served as an Adviser for the American Law Institute project Model Penal Code Sentencing; on the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Research Council; on the Professional Ethics Committee in the State of Connecticut; as a Commissioner of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women in Connecticut; as President of the Connecticut Bar Foundation; on the Dartmouth College Board of Trustees; as faculty sponsor and director of the Women's Campaign School at Yale; as Deputy Dean of Yale Law School; and, by appointment of the Chief Justice of the United States, on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Her book on the federal sentencing guidelines, Fear of Judging (with J.A. Cabranes), was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the ABA in 1999. A graduate of Dartmouth College, the Kennedy School of Government, and Harvard Law School, she clerked for Judge Carl McGowan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and for Supreme Court Justice Byron R.White.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
Andrew Brasher served as a United States District Judge for the Middle District of Alabama. Before taking the bench in May 2019, Judge Brasher was the Solicitor General of the State of Alabama, where he argued cases before the United States Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the Alabama Supreme Court. He previously served for several years as the Deputy Solicitor General and practiced in the litigation and white-collar criminal defense practice groups in the Birmingham, Alabama office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP. Upon graduation from law school, Judge Brasher served as a law clerk to Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Judge Brasher earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Samford University and his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review.
Shareholder, Maynard Cooper & Gale
John Neiman is a go-to lawyer for clients with high-stakes appeals in Alabama and elsewhere. In the last two years, John has helped clients obtain reversals by the Alabama Supreme Court of an $11.4 million verdict in one case and an $18 million verdict in another. In a recent Eleventh Circuit case, he helped a client obtain vacatur of a trial court’s decision not to compel arbitration of a $66.5 million bad-faith insurance claim. He also has served as embedded appellate counsel at a trial, preserving the client’s objections for appeal when the plaintiffs asked the jury for more than $100 million in compensatory and punitive damages. A former U.S. Supreme Court clerk and Solicitor General of Alabama, John chairs an Appellate Practice group that strives to offer the firm’s clients the highest level of appellate advocacy at Alabama-level rates.
At any given time, John has a number of cases pending in the Alabama Supreme Court and Eleventh Circuit, but he also represents clients in a wide array of cases throughout the country. John has appeared for alcohol-industry clients in the Supreme Court and the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Circuits, and has represented insurance clients in state courts in California, New York, and Kentucky. As state Solicitor General from 2011 to 2014, John argued two merits cases at the United States Supreme Court.
John is a fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. Chambers USA: America's Leading Lawyers for Business distinguishes him as a Band 1 leading attorney in the area of Appellate Litigation. Best Lawyers® named him the region's 2017 and 2021 "Lawyer of the Year" for Appellate Practice.
Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh was born in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 1965. He married Ashley Estes in 2004, and they have two daughters - Margaret and Liza. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1987 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1990. He served as a law clerk for Judge Walter Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1990-1991, for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1991-1992, and for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1993 Term. In 1992-1993, he was an attorney in the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States. From 1994 to 1997 and for a period in 1998, he was Associate Counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel. He was a partner at a Washington, D.C., law firm from 1997 to 1998 and again from 1999 to 2001. From 2001 to 2003, he was Associate Counsel and then Senior Associate Counsel to President George W. Bush. From 2003 to 2006, he was Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary for President Bush. He was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006. President Donald J. Trump nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat on October 6, 2018.
Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
William H. Pryor Jr. serves as Chief Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2013–18, he served on the United States Sentencing Commission and, in 2017–18, served as Acting Chair.
He has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Alabama School of Law and previously taught as an adjunct professor at the Cumberland School of Law of Samford University.
He served as the 45th Attorney General of Alabama from 1997 to 2004. When he took office, he was the youngest attorney general in the nation. In his reelection, he received the highest percentage of votes of any statewide candidate.
He graduated magna cum laude from Tulane Law School where he finished first in the common-law curriculum and was editor in chief of the Tulane Law Review. He then served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
He is a member of The American Law Institute and an Adviser for the RESTATEMENT OF THE LAW THIRD, CONFLICT OF LAWS. He is a coauthor with Bryan Garner, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and several other judges of a treatise, THE LAW OF JUDICIAL PRECEDENT. He has published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Yale Law & Policy Review, George Mason Law Review, Florida Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Case Western Reserve Law Review, and Tulane Law Review. He has published op-eds in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Review, and USA Today. He has debated at National Lawyers’ Conventions of the Federalist Society (including on National Public Radio) and at the Oxford Union in the United Kingdom. And he is listed among several “widely admired judicial writers” in Bryan Garner’s The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style.
He is a member of the Tulane Law School Hall of Fame and has received the Defender of the Constitution Award from the Heritage Foundation, the Jurist of the Year Award from the Texas Review of Law & Politics, and the St. Thomas More Award from the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta. Judge Pryor is also a proud member of the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
Professor, Cumberland School of Law, Samford University
Michael DeBow joined the Cumberland faculty in 1988. He regularly teaches courses in Property, Business Organizations, Administrative Law, Legislation, and Local Government.
Professor DeBow is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the University of Alabama (1976, 1978). He graduated from the Yale Law School in 1980, and is a member of the District of Columbia Bar.
DeBow's career included a stint in private practice in Washington, D.C., followed by a judicial clerkship with Judge Kenneth W. Starr of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1983-84. DeBow then served as an attorney-advisor to Federal Trade Commission chairman James C. Miller III (1984-85), and a special assistant to Assistant Attorney General Douglas Ginsburg, in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (1985-86). He began his teaching career at the University of Georgia business school, where he taught for two years prior to coming to Samford.
From 2000 to 2004, DeBow also acted in a part-time capacity as special assistant for legal policy to Alabama attorney general Bill Pryor. He was a visiting professor of law at George Mason University in 1999. He was a (nonresident) Salvatori Fellow of The Heritage Foundation during 1993-95, and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Private Enterprise Education during 1995-99. DeBow attended summer institutes in quantitative methods for law professors (George Mason Law & Economics Center, 1990), Austrian economics (NYU Department of Economics, 1997), and the study of freedom (Templeton Foundation Freedom Project, 2000). In 2008 he was named an Adjunct Fellow of the Alabama Policy Institute.
Professor DeBow has taught several undergraduate courses at Samford, including one which received a supporting grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Most recently, he taught an undergraduate course in law and economics for the Samford's Brock School of Business. He has also taught public health law for the UAB School of Public Health on several occasions.
DeBow's articles have appeared in such journals as the Texas Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Regulation, Policy Review, The Freeman, and the Journal of Law & Politics. He co-edits the Federalist Society's Pre-Law Reading List and its annotated bibliography of conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.
Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
Andrew Brasher served as a United States District Judge for the Middle District of Alabama. Before taking the bench in May 2019, Judge Brasher was the Solicitor General of the State of Alabama, where he argued cases before the United States Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and the Alabama Supreme Court. He previously served for several years as the Deputy Solicitor General and practiced in the litigation and white-collar criminal defense practice groups in the Birmingham, Alabama office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP. Upon graduation from law school, Judge Brasher served as a law clerk to Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Judge Brasher earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Samford University and his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review.
Special Session: Overreach in the States
Adam P. Laxalt, Leonard A. Leo, William H. Pryor, Adam White
This panel of current and former state Attorneys General will examine the relationship between the...
Special Session: Overreach in the States
Adam P. Laxalt, Leonard A. Leo, William H. Pryor, Adam White
This panel of current and former state Attorneys General will examine the relationship between the...
Eighth Annual Rosenkranz Debate
2015 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DCNLC: Attorneys General Panel
Among the most consequential decisions a state Attorney General can make is whether to defend...
Special Session: Overreach in the States
2015 National Lawyers Convention
Washington, DCA Conversation About the Federal Sentencing Guidelines
Supreme Court Round-Up
Birmingham, AlabamaA Conversation with Judge Bill Pryor and Judge Brett Kavanaugh
Washington, District of ColumbiaThe Strange Death of Socialist Legal Theory
Montogomery, AlabamaWeighing the Legal Arguments for Gay Marriage from a Federalism Perspective
Birmingham, Alabama