The Center for Constitutional Studies has had the wonderful opportunity of hosting many distinguished guests to speak at CCS Conferences and Lecture Series. Below is a list of all Center guests and their biographies.
Please note that the below biographies have each been compiled based on publicly available information during the time that each guest had first visited the Center. If any updates or changes are desired, please email the Center at constitution@uvu.edu.
Alessandro Acquisti is an Associate Professor of Information Technology (IT) and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, a member of Carnegie Mellon Cylab, and a fellow of the Ponemon Institute. His work investigates the economic and social impact of IT, and in particular the economics and behavioral economics of privacy and information security, as well as privacy in online social networks. His findings have been featured in media outlets such as NPR, NBC, MSNBC.com, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Scientist, CNN, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV.
Acquisti has received national and international awards, including the Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and the IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award. In 2007, he co-chaired the DIMACS Workshop on Information Security Economics and the WEIS Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. In 2008, he co-chaired the first Workshop on Security and Human Behavior with Ross Anderson, Bruce Schneier, and George Loewenstein. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, Microsoft Corporation, as well as CMU CyLab and CMU Berkman Fund.
Acquisti has lived and studied in Rome (Laurea, Economics, University of Rome), Dublin (M.Litt., Economics, Trinity College), London (M.Sc., Econometrics and Mathematical Economics, LSE), and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he worked with John Chuang, Doug Tygar, Florian Zettelmeyer, and Hal Varian and received a master's and a PhD in Information Management and Systems from the University of California at Berkeley.
William B. Allen is an Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean of James Madison College at Michigan State University. In 2019-20 he is a Visiting Senior Professor in the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado. He served previously on the United States National Council for the Humanities and as Chairman and Member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has published extensively, including Re-Thinking Uncle Tom: The Political Philosophy of H. B. Stowe (Lexington Books) and George Washington: America's First Progressive (Peter Lang, Inc.).
Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. His work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society. He has been favorably cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in over 30 cases (citing to four different books and more than a dozen distinct articles), and he regularly testifies before Congress at the invitation of both Republicans and Democrats. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2008 he received the DeVane Medal—Yale’s highest award for teaching excellence. He has written widely for popular publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was an informal consultant to the popular TV show, The West Wing, and his work has been showcased on more recent TV shows such as The Colbert Report, Charlie Rose, and The MHP Show. Professor Amar is also the author of several books, including The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005), America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012), and The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of our Constitutional Republic (Basic Books, 2015). His new book, The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era, is being published in September 2016, just in time for the election.
Dr. Sophie Ambler is the Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of East Anglia and a member of the Magna Carta Project. Dr. Ambler taught British Medieval History at Kings College London before moving to the University of East Anglia, where she teaches on the Crusades. Her publications include: The Montfortian bishops and the justification of conciliar government in 1264 (2011), On Kingship and Tyranny: Grosseteste's Memorandum and its Place in the Baronial Reform Movement (2013), and The Church and the Propaganda of Political Reform in Thirteenth-Century England (annual lecture of the Pipe Roll Society, 2013). Dr. Ambler has worked on AHRC’s Breaking of Britain project and the People of Northern England (PoNE) database.
Dr. Ambler received a Thornley Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, a Full AHRC award for doctoral research from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and earned an Inglis Studentship in History from Kings College London. Educated at Kings College London, she received her BA in 2006 and completed her PhD in 2012. She has published articles in Historical Research and Thirteenth Century England. Dr. Ambler’s research interests include the role of bishops in the political community of medieval England, particularly their role in rebellion, revolution and the promotion of Magna Carta.
Jeremy D. Bailey holds a dual appointment in Political Science and the Honors College at the University of Houston. His research interests include executive power, constitutionalism, and American political thought and development. His major publications include The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History (University Press of Kansas, 2019), James Madison and Constitutional Imperfection (Cambridge University Press, 2015), The Contested Removal Power, 1789-2010 (University Press of Kansas 2013, coauthored with David Alvis and Flagg Taylor), which was named a 2014 “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice, "The New Unitary Executive and Democratic Theory," (American Political Science Review 2008) and Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge University Press 2007). With Susan McWilliams, he is editor of American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, published quarterly by University of Chicago Press. Bailey attended Rhodes College and received his Ph.D. from Boston College, where his dissertation was the 2004 co-winner of the APSA' s E. E. Schattschneider Prize for best dissertation in American politics. He joined the University of Houston in 2007, and, in 2014, he was awarded the University's Provost Core Teaching Excellence Award. He is the director of the Phronesis minor in the Honors College and the co-director of the Tocqueville Forum in American Ideas and Institutions.
Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He also directs the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and the Knight Law and Media Program at Yale. Professor Balkin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and founded and edits the group blog Balkinization. His books include Living Originalism; Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World; The Constitution in 2020 (with Reva Siegel); Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. with Brest, Levinson, Amar, and Siegel); Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology; The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life; What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said; and What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.
A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer holds the John Phillips Chair in Religion at Dartmouth, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth College. He earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before becoming the Mandel Family Professor in the Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College in 2012 and the Dartmouth Professor in the Arts & Sciences in 2014. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008.
Dr. Balmer has published widely in both scholarly journals and in the popular press. His op-ed articles have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, theAnchorage Daily News, and the New York Times. His work has also appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review,Christian Century, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, andWashington Post Book World. Dr. Balmer is regularly asked to comment on religion in American life, and he has appeared frequently on network television, on NPR, and on both the Colbert Report and the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart. He has been an expert witness in several First Amendment cases, including Snyder v. Phelps and Glassroth v. Moore, the so-called Alabama Ten Commandments case.
Dr. Balmer has published more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, and The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: AJourney into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part documentary for PBS. Dr. Balmer wrote and hosted that series as well as a two-part series on creationism and a documentary on Billy Graham. He has lectured around the country in such venues as the Commonwealth Club of California and the Chautauqua Institution and, under the auspices of the State Department, in Austria and Lebanon.
Barber is the author of: Constitutional Failure (University Press of Kansas, 2014); Fallacies of States' Rights (Harvard, 2013); C. With Robert George, he is the co-editor of Constitutional Politics: Essays in Constitution Making, Maintenance, and Change (Princeton, 2002), among others. He has also published numerous articles on constitutional theory in journals of law and political science. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has taught at the University of South Florida and held visiting professorships at Princeton University and the University of Michigan.
Stephanie Barclay is a First Amendment scholar who researches and writes about the role our different democratic institutions play in protecting minority rights, particularly at the intersection of free speech and religious exercise issues. Professor Barclay’s academic writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as the Washington University Law Review, theBoston College Law Review, the Indiana Law Journal, and the Arizona Law Review. Professor Barclay has frequently appeared in the national media to discuss First Amendment issues, including appearances on BBC World News, Wall Street Journal Live, and Fox News. And her work has been featured in many media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg BNA, Deseret News, The Hill, and Law 360. Professor Barclay teaches First Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, Family Law, and Constitutional Law. Her second- and third-year students voted her 2L/3L Professor of the Year. Professor Barclay joined the faculty of BYU Law School as an Associate Professor of Law in July 2018. Prior to teaching, Professor Barclay litigated First Amendment cases full-time at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where she represented many organizations and individuals at both the trial and appellate level, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Barclay has twice been named a Washington D.C. Super Lawyer Rising Star (for 2016 and 2019), and worked at Covington in Washington, D.C., where she drafted multiple Supreme Court briefs, including defending the rights of a Muslim prison inmate seeking to wear a religious beard. She served as lead counsel on multiple additional trials and appeals. Professor Barclay was nominated to serve as the Director of Programs for the AALS Law and Religion Section, and as a subcommittee chair for the JRCLS International Religious Freedom Committee. She graduated summa cum laude from BYU Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif. Professor Barclay also clerked for the Honorable N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Randy E. Barnett teaches constitutional law and contracts, and is Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook COunty States' Attorney's Office in Chicago. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies and the Bradley Prize, he has been a visiting professor at Penn, Northwestern and Harvard Law School. Professor Barnett's publications incudes twelve books, more than one hundred articles and reviews, as well as numerous op-eds. His most recent book is Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People (HarperCollins, 2016). His other books include: Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2d ed. 2014); The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law (Oxford, 2d ed 2014); A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (co-authored)(Palgrave, 2013); Contracts: Cases and Doctrine (Wolters Kluwer, 6th ed. 2017); Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Wolters Kluwer, 2nd ed. 2013); The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Contracts (Oxford 2010). In 2004, he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzalez v. Raich before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2012, he was one of the lawyers representing the National Federation of Independent Business in its constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act. He appeared on PBS's Constitution USA with Peter Sagal; and he portrayed a prosecutor in the 2010 science-fiction feature film, InAlienable.
Molly Brady's primary teaching and research interests are in property law, land use law, local government law, legal history and intellectual property law. Brady received an A.B. summa cum laude in history from Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Brady then obtained her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was awarded the Quintin Johnstone Prize in Real Property Law, the Jewell Prize, and the Cullen Prize. During law school, she served as co-editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Law and Technology and was a Coker Teaching Fellow in contract law. After graduation, she served as a clerk to Judge Bruce M. Selya on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and practiced at Ropes & Gray in Boston as a corporate associate focusing on intellectual property transactions.
Professor Brant is a tenured Professor of Law with Ohio Northern University since 1991. She has also taught law students at Ohio State University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. She served as Chair of the AALS Section on Law and Religion in 2001. She has repeatedly won "Best Teacher" awards, and published many articles on church state and other constitutional issues. She has made invited presentations to the AALS, Berkeley, George Washington, and other schools. She clerked for The Honorable Pierce Lively, (then) Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. She teaches classes on church and state, constitutional law, election law and federal courts.
David Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and the chairperson of the political science department. His most recent book is Seeking the Promised Land: Mormons and American Politics (with John Green and Quin Monson). He is also the co-author (with Robert Putnam) of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which has been described by the New York Times as intellectually powerful and by the San Francisco Chronicle as the most successfully argued sociological study of American religion in more than half a century. As an expert on religion, politics, and civic engagement, Professor Campbell has often been featured in the national media, including the New York Times, The Economist, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, NBC News, CNN, NPR, Fox News, and C-SPAN.
Joel Campbell has been an associate professor of journalism in Brigham Young University's School of Communications since 2002. He holds a master's degree from Ohio State University. He teaches reporting and writing, journalism principles, and research courses. He actively researches media ethics and law and freedom of information issues. He is past president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and chairman of Society of Professional Journalists' national Freedom of Information Committee. He has represented the Utah Press Association on Utah's Capitol in legislative battles involving Utah's open records and meetings laws.
Henry C. Clark is a visiting professor in the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College, and he has taught at many other prestigious colleges and universities. He is the author of La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France (1994) and Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France (2007), and the editor and translator of Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith (2003) and Montesquieu: My Thoughts (2012). His latest book is Encyclopedic Liberty: Political Articles from the Dictionary of Diderot and d'Alembert (2016), and edited volume co-translated with Christine D. Henderson. His articles and reviews have appeared in journals of history, political science, philosophy, sociology, and economics.
Before joining Capital University Law School in 2003, Charles C. Cohen practiced with the law firm of Farella Braun & Martel LLP in San Francisco, where his work focused on real property and bankruptcy transactions and litigation. Prior to law school he was a professional journalist, writer and editor based in New York. Professor Cohen's scholarly interests lie primarily in the field of real property, particularly takings and eminent domain law. His article Eminent Domain After Kelo v. City of New London: An Argument for Banning Economic Development Takings, appeared in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and has been cited by the highest courts of Ohio and Maryland as well as in numerous legal publications.
Dr. Nicholas Cole studies the political thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the history of democratic institutions. His particular interests are the influence of classical political thought on America’s first politicians, and the search for a new ‘science of politics’ in post-Independence America. He runs the Quill Project on Negotiated Texts, based at Pembroke College, which studies the creation of constitutions, treaties, and legislation. The Quill software platform (developed with colleagues at the Oxford e-Research Centre) presents a recreation of the original context within which decisions about these texts were made. The flagship work of the project is a presentation of the records of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that wrote the Constitution of the United States and a variety of other projects are planned or in progress. Dr. Cole teaches American history and the history of political thought and supervises graduates working on the history of institutions, political thought and classical reception. He runs the TORCH network on Negotiated Texts.
Catherine Crump is a Staff Attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. She has litigated numerous cases regarding constitutional law involving civil liberties violations—namely the first and fourth amendment rights—including a lawsuit challenging the federal Internet censorship law, the Child Online Protection Act, and lawsuits challenging the use of Internet filtering technologies in public schools and libraries. Current cases include constitutional challenges to the government’s authority to engage in suspicionless searches of laptops at the international border and to its assertion that it can track the location of cell phones without a warrant. She has written extensively about topics such as preserving speech and privacy in the digital age and appears regularly in the media.
Crump is also a non-residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School. Prior to joining the ACLU, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
After earning her Bachelor of Science degree at Brigham Young University, Margaret Dayton worked for several years as a Registered Nurse. She married Dr. Lynn T. Dayton, a Provo physician. The Daytons are deeply committed to their family.
Shortly after her marriage, Mrs. Dayton chose to put aside her career as an RN in favor of being a full-time mother and wife. Of that experience, she says, “I am deeply grateful to have been able to stay home as a full-time mom. It’s a choice that is becoming increasingly elusive in our society, and I count myself very fortunate to have had that option.”
Mrs. Dayton has always been involved in community service efforts, including:
Service as a once-a-week elementary classroom volunteer for 15 years,
Served on the Board of Trustees for College of Eastern Utah for 8 years (Board Chair for 2 of those years),
Terms as County President and State Board Member of the Medical Alliance (the service arm of the Utah Medical Association).
Currently serving on advisory boards for UVSC and Alpine Adult Education Advisory Board.
Mrs. Dayton has been continually involved in both church and community service.
An expert on state politics, John Dinan analyzes North Carolina politics and elections. He closely follows North Carolina political races and can comment on state elections as well as congressional races.
Dinan studies the role state governments play in the US federal system. He has written about the role that state government officials played during deliberations over the 2010 federal health care reform law. He has discussed the impact on states of federal directives regarding education, immigration, drivers’ licenses, and drug enforcement, as well as the ways that state officials have tried to talk back to federal officials to secure accommodation of state concerns regarding these policies.
Brian Domitrovic is a historian of supply-side economics. He has written the history of supply-side economics Econoclasts (2009); co-authored with Lawrence Kudlow the history of the 1964 tax cut JFK and the Reagan Revolution (2016); and edited several volumes of the collected works of economist Arthur Laffer, including The Pillars of Reaganomics (2014) and Oil and Energy (2016). He has briefed public officials including the Federal Reserve chair, has appeared in numerous media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to National Public Radio, writes regularly at Forbes.com, appears regularly on Fox Business television, and has taught at several universities including as the visiting scholar of conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado Boulder. Currently he is the Richard S. Strong Scholar at the Laffer Center. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard and lives in The Woodlands, Texas.
Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an op-ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005), and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review. He lives with his wife and daughters in Washington, D.C.
Daniel L. Dreisbach is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, DC He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Virginia. Following law school, he served as a judicial clerk for Circuit Judge Robert F. Chapman of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and for two years he practiced public interest law specializing in civil and religious liberties.
Professor Dreisbach's research interests include constitutional law and the intersection of politics, law and religion in American public life. He is a current member of the editorial board of Politics and Religion (a Cambridge University Press journal) and a former managing editor of the Journal of Law and Politics. He has authored or edited eight books, including Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York University Press, 2002), Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2014) and The Sacred Rights of Conscience (Liberty Fund, 2009). He has contributed essays to leading reference works such as The Cambridge History of Religions in America (2012) and Oxford Handbook on Church and State in the United States (2010). He has published over 75 book chapters, reviews and articles in scholarly journals, including American Journal of Legal History,Constitutional Commentary, Emory Law Journal, Politics and Religion, Journal of Church and State and William & Mary Quarterly.
The U.S. Supreme Court has cited Dreisbach's scholarship, and he served as a consultant to the Library of Congress for a major exhibit on "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic." He has been a featured commentator in numerous documentaries, including the recent PBS (American Experience and Frontline, WGBH-Boston) series, "God in America." He is a Senior Fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. In 2006-07, he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Professor Dreisbach is a past recipient of American University's highest faculty award, "Scholar/Teacher of the Year."
Mr. Dushku is a shareholder of Kirton McConkie and a member of the firm’s board of directors. He is also a member of Kirton McConkie’s First Amendment and Religious Organizations section.
From 1995-1996, Mr. Dushku was a judicial clerk to Judge Daniel A. Manion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He received the “Mountain States Super Lawyers: Litigation” award in 2013 and 2014, and the “Utah Legal Elite: Civil Litigation” award from 2011-2014.
Focusing his practice on critical motions and appeals in complex civil cases in state and federal courts across the nation, Mr. Dushku has experience in the following: litigation involving a broad range of constitutional and civil rights issues, including establishment clause and free exercise issues, free speech issues, free press issues, property rights and takings issues, equal protection issues, and due process issues; litigation involving complex issues of employment law; consultations with a diverse group of clients, including state and local governments, concerning constitutional and civil rights issues; and all types of civil appeals before state and federal appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Dushku graduated from Brigham Young University, BA, Economics, summa cum laude, 1990 Brigham Young University, J. Reuben Clark Law School, JD, magna cum laude, 1993 Order of the Coif.
John Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service and former Dean at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1999, specializing in Constitutional Law, Legal History, and Property. He also leads the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute that he founded in 1999. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of Dallas. He serves as the Chairman of the Board of the National Organization for Marriage and is Chairman of the Federalist Society’s Federalism & Separation of Powers practice group. Prior to joining the Chapman law faculty, Dr. Eastman served as a law clerk to the Honorable Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States, and to the Honorable J. Michael Luttig, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with the national law firm of Kirkland & Ellis. Dr. Eastman has also represented numerous clients in important constitutional law matters and has argued before the Supreme Court. On behalf of the Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, he has participated as amicus curiae before the Supreme Court of the United States, U.S. Courts of Appeals, and State Supreme Courts in more than one hundred forty cases of constitutional significance, including Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (the school vouchers case), Kelo v. New London, Ct. (eminent domain), and Van Orden v. Perry (the 10 Commandments case). He has also appeared as an expert legal commentator on numerous television and radio programs, including C-SPAN, Fox News, PBS, NewsHour, and The O’Reilly Factor.
Kirk Ellis has won two Emmys, a WGA Award, a Peabody and the Humanitas Prize for his work as writer and co-executive producer on the HBO miniseries “John Adams.” The miniseries won a record breaking 13 Emmys in total, as well as four Golden Globe awards. Previously, Ellis received an Emmy nomination and won the WGA Award and Humanitas Prize for the ABC miniseries “Anne Frank,” which he wrote and co-produced. Miniseries on which he has served as writer and producer have garnered more than 50 Emmy nominations. With Bryan Cranston and ITV Studios, Ellis is executive producer and show runner for “A Great Improvisation,” based on the book by Stacy Schiff, which chronicles Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to negotiate a treaty with France at the height of the American Revolution. For History, he is writing a limited series about Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s years in Japan and Korea. Ellis is also developing “Aspasia,” a dramatic series set in the world of Periclean Greece, with director Julio Medem and actress Ursula Corbero, star of the record-breaking Netflix series “La Casa de Papel." Upcoming motion picture projects include “Age of Reason,” based on an incident in the life of Thomas Paine, and the bilingual feature “El Democrata,” the story of Mexican Revolutionary hero Francisco Madero. Ellis is also co-author of “The Order: 1886," a history-based videogame for Sony, which debuted to record sales in February 2015. Most recently, he wrote the 30th annual National Memorial Day Concert, which garnered an audience of over 11 million in its live PBS broadcast. A graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television, Ellis began his professional career as a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, and at age 24 served as the magazine's international editor. In 1992 he formed Shadow Catcher Productions, an independent production banner under which Ellis develops his own indie features and documentaries. Ellis made his feature film debut writing and co-producing “The Grass Harp,” based on the coming-of-age novel by Truman Capote. A former co-governor of the writers' branch of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Ellis served for four years as chairman of the Santa Fe, New Mexico Arts Commission and serves as trustee for the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. The former president of Western Writers of America, he received both the WWA Spur Award and the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum for his episode of the TNT/Dreamworks miniseries, “Into the West.”
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Director of the Classical Liberal Institute, newly formed at NYU Law. He is also the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Epstein served as Interim Dean of the Chicago Law School from February to June 2001. He was a Senior Fellow of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School since 1983, editor of the Journal of Legal Studies from 1981 to 1991, and editor of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1991 to 2001.
Among Epstein’s many books are: The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (Harvard 2014); Cases and Materials on Torts (Aspen Law & Business; 10th ed. 2012) (with Catherine M. Sharkey); and Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (Harvard 2011). He has also written numerous articles on a wide range of legal and interdisciplinary subjects.
Epstein received an honorary LLD from the University of Ghent, a bachelor's degree from Columbia University (summa cum laude), a bachelor's degree (Juris) first class from Oxford University, and a Bachelor of Law degree from Yale Law School (cum laude), where he was elected to the Order of the Coif. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1985 and a member of the California Bar since 1969.
Malcolm M. Feeley was named the 2008-2009 Martin and Kathleen Crane Fellow. He holds the Clare Sanders Clements Dean’s Chair in Law (Boalt Hall) at UC Berkeley. Since 1984, he has been associated with the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program in the School of Law at UC Berkeley. From 2005-2007, Feeley was the President of the Law & Society Association, and he currently serves as co-editor, with Jonathan Simon, of the journal, Punishment & Society. The author or editor of numerous books and articles on the judicial process and the criminal justice system, Feeley’s 1979 book, The Process is the Punishment, received the ABA's Silver Gavel Award for best book in law. One of His most recent books (with Ed Rubin) is Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Choice (Michigan).
Feeley has taught at NYU, Yale (where he was a Russell Sage Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and the Behavioral Sciences) and Wisconsin. He has also held several visiting positions abroad, including in Jerusalem, Cologne, Milan, Bologna, and Kobe. He is currently involved in a trio of historically-oriented studies on the criminal process, including a comparative historical study of women accused of crime in the eighteenth century, which is near completion. The others explore the importance of privatization in the development of the prison system, and the origins and antecedents of plea bargaining. He plans to work on these projects during his tenure at LAPA. Feeley received his PhD in political science in 1969 from the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Noah Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 2003, Feldman served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution.
He received his BA summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a PhD in Oriental Studies from Oxford University in 1994. He received his JD from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Dr. Feldman served as a law clerk to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit (1997 to 1998) and to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999). From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard.
Dr. Feldman is the author of seven books: Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003. He most recently co-authored Constitutional Law, Eighteenth Edition (Foundation Press, 2013) with Kathleen Sullivan.
Robert Field is a nationally recognized expert on health policy and public health law. His research focuses on ethical issues in managed care, public policy, and legal facets of health care reform and genetic screening. He holds a joint appointment as professor of health management and policy at the Drexel School of Public Health.
Professor Field is the author of Health Care Regulation in America: Complexity, Confrontation and Compromise, a comprehensive guide to the government's role in regulating health care in the United States published by Oxford University Press. Some of his recent publications include “Government as the Crucible for Free Market Health Care: Regulation, Reimbursement, and Reform,” “A Taxonomy of American Health Care Regulation: Implications for Health Reform,” and “Beyond Drug Coverage: The Cumulative Effect of Privatization Reforms in the Medicare Modernization Act.” Before joining the faculty of the law school, he taught at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, where he founded and chaired the Department of Health Policy and Public Health and directed the Graduate Program in Health Policy. Professor Field earned his JD at the Columbia University School of Law, where he was an associate editor of the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law.
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Law at The Florida International University and a popular New York Times columnist. Fish received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his master’s degree and doctorate degree from Yale University. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1962-74); Johns Hopkins University (1974-85), and Duke University (1986-1998). From 1993 through 1998, he served as Executive Director of Duke University Press. Fish was also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at The John Marshall Law School from 2000 through 2002.
In addition to being one of the country’s leading public intellectuals, Professor Fish is an extraordinarily prolific author whose works include over 200 scholarly publications and books. He has written for many of the country’s leading law journals, including Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. Among his many books are: Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967) (and a thirtieth anniversary edition in 1997); Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature (1972); Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989); There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (1994); Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995); and The Trouble with Principle (1999).
Dr. Louis Fisher is the Scholar in Residence at the Constitution Project. Previously, he worked for four decades at the Library of Congress as Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers (Congressional Research Service, from 1970 to 2006) and Specialist in Constitutional Law (the Law Library, from 2006 to 2010). During his service with CRS, he was research director of the House Iran-Contra Committee in 1987, writing major sections of the final report. Fisher's specialties include constitutional law, war powers, budget policy, executive-legislative relations, and judicial-congressional relations. After completing his doctoral work in political science at the New School for Social Research in 1967, he taught full-time at Queens College for three years. He later taught part-time at Georgetown University, American University, Catholic University Law School, Indiana University, Catholic University, the College of William and Mary Law School, and Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the William and Mary Law School.
Dr. Leslie P. Francis holds joint appointments as Alfred C. Emery professor of law and professor of philosophy, and adjunct appointments in Family and Preventive Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Political Science. She was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor in 2009. Dr. Francis received a BA from Wellesley College, where she graduated with high honors in philosophy. She received a PhD in philosophy (1974) from the University of Michigan. Professor Francis received her JD from the University of Utah (1981) and served as a law clerk to Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Appointed to the law faculty in 1982, she teaches and writes extensively in the areas of health law, bioethics, and disability. Dr. Francis currently serves as a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, where she co-chairs the subcommittee on Privacy, Confidentiality, and Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee and of the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging.
Matthew J. Franck is the Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, in Radford, Virginia, where he taught constitutional law, American politics, and political philosophy from 1989 to 2010, and was Chairman of the Department of Political Science from 1995 to 2010. He is also currently a Visiting Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University.
Franck earned his B.A. in political science from Virginia Wesleyan College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. He was a Henry J. Salvatori Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in 1993, J. William Fulbright Professor of American Studies in 1998 at the Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, 2008-09.
He is the author of Against the Imperial Judiciary: The Supreme Court vs. the Sovereignty of the People; co-editor with Richard G. Stevens of Sober As a Judge: The Supreme Court and Republican Liberty; and a contributor to several other books. He has published essays and reviews in numerous academic journals, and reviews and commentaries on constitutional and political subjects in such places as the Washington Post, First Things, National Review, the Claremont Review of Books, Public Discourse, National Affairs, and The New Atlantis. Franck blogs at NRO’s “Bench Memos” and at the “First Thoughts” blog at First Things, and has appeared numerous times on Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show, as well as on CNN, Fox, and NPR.
Salim Furth is a Research Fellow in macroeconomics at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis. Before joining Heritage in 2012, he was a visiting assistant professor of economics at Amherst College and visiting research scholar at Northeastern Univeristy. Furth completed a doctorate in economics at the University of Rochester.
Frank W. Garmon Jr is a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University. His research and teaching emphasizes economic and business history, entrepreneurship, and the history of technology. He has papers forthcoming at the Journal of the Early Republic and ;Historical Methods. Garmon studied history and economics at Christopher Newport University, before completing his MA and PhD in history at the University of Virginia. For his dissertation research, Garmon sampled state property tax records to measure changes in wealth after the American Revolution. His book project, The Price of Liberty: How the Constitution Created a Nation of Taxpayers, considers how the debates over direct taxation shaped the development of American federalism.
Frederick Gedicks is the Guy Anderson Chair, and a professor of law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. He is widely published on law and religion, constitutional law, and constitutional interpretation. His publications include two books: The Rhetoric of Church and State: A Critical Analysis of Religion Clause Jurisprudence (Duke University Press, 1995), and Choosing the Dream: The Future of Religion in American Public Life (Greenwood Press, 1991) with Roger Hendrix. Other recent publications include: “Incorporation of the Establishment Clause Against the States: A Logical, Textual, and Historical Account” (88 Indiana Law Journal 699, 2013) and “Narrative Pluralism and Doctrinal Incoherence in Hosanna-Tabor” (64 Mercer Law Review 405, 2013). Professor Gedicks is currently working with Professors Robert Tuttle, Micah Schwartzman, and Nelson Tebbe on a religious freedom casebook for West Publishing.
Professor Gedicks has lectured in Italian at universities throughout Italy, including the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (at both its Milan and Piacenza campuses), the Graduate Institute of Sant'Anna in Pisa, and the Universities of Alessandria, Como, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Salerno, Siena, and Turin. He was a Visiting Research Fellow for the ReligioWest project at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, during November and December 2012. Professor Gedicks grew up in New Jersey and southern California. Following graduation from law school, Gedicks worked as a clerk on the Ninth Circuit and practiced corporation and securities law in Phoenix, Arizona. Professor Gedicks then joined the faculty at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 1990, after four years at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, and one year at the University of Denver.
Sally Gordon is well known for her work on religion in American public life and the law of church and state, especially for the ways that religious liberty developed over the course of American national history. She is a frequent commentator in the press as well as in scholarly literature. Her first book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Univ. of North Carolina, 2002), won the Mormon History Association’s and the Utah Historical Society’s best book awards in 2003. Gordon’s new book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard, 2010), explores the world of church and state in the 20th century. She is currently working on a third book, titled Freedom’s Holy Light: Disestablishment in America, 1776-1876, about the historical relationship between religion, politics, and law.
In 2015-16, Gordon is a Guggenheim Fellow, and also holds fellowships from ICJS at Monticello, and the Huntington Library. Gordon also serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History, and is on the boards of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the McDowell-Hartman Foundation. In 2011, she received the University’s Lindback Award for distinguished teaching and in 2004 and 2009 the Law School’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2012, she was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Tracy Gordon is a senior fellow with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, where she researches and writes about fiscal challenges facing state and local governments, including budget tradeoffs, intergovernmental relations, and long-term sustainability. Before joining the Urban Institute, Gordon served as a senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She was also a member of the District of Columbia Tax Revision Commission, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, an assistant professor at the Maryland School of Public Policy, and a fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Gordon has written extensively on state and local government finances, including taxes, budgeting, intergovernmental relations, municipal debt, and pensions. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and she has appeared on CSPAN, Fox Business News, and NPR. Gordon holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy with a concurrent MA in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sir Christopher Greenwood is a Judge and member of the International Court of Justice, to which he was elected on 6 November, 2008. Prior to his election, he was Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and a practicing barrister who regularly argues cases about international law before international and English courts. Educated at Wellingborough School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, he obtained degrees in Law and International Law with first class honors and was elected a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, shortly before his twenty-third birthday. He taught at Cambridge for nearly twenty years before being appointed to a Chair of International Law at the London School of Economics in 1996. His publications include eighty volumes of the International Law Reports (Joint Editor with Sir Elihu Lauterpacht QC) and The Kuwait Crisis: Basic Documents (1991) and a collection of essays – Essays on War in International Law (2006) He is currently working on a tenth edition of Oppenheim’s International Law. As a barrister he has argued more than forty cases before the English courts, International Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights and other international tribunals. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1999 and made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for services to public international law in 2002.
Professor of Law Michael S. Greve joined the law school faculty of the George Mason University School of Law in fall 2012, after serving as John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). While at AEI, he specialized in constitutional law, courts, and business regulation and served as chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Prior to joining AEI, Greve was founder and co-director of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm specializing in constitutional litigation. Greve has served previously as an adjunct professor at a number of universities, including Cornell and Johns Hopkins Universities, and has been a visiting professor at Boston College since 2004. He was awarded a PhD and an MA in government by Cornell University. Greve also earned a Diploma from the University of Hamburg in Germany.
A prolific writer, Greve is the author of nine books and a multitude of articles appearing in scholarly publications, as well as numerous editorials, short articles, and book reviews. He is a frequent speaker for professional and scholarly organizations and has made many appearances on radio and television. In addition, Greve has provided congressional and state legislative testimony, has lobbied and consulted in federal agency proceedings, and has provided litigation services and management in over 30 cases, including matters before the US Supreme Court.
Susan Griffith is a professional genealogist, earning her degree in Family History from Brigham Young University after raising six children. A native of Washington, DC, Susan moved to Utah fifteen years ago when her husband took a position at BYU. Her scholarly interests include the family history of African Americans, American Indians, and those in the British Isles. Susan has spoken on family history topics to many audiences and has presented at the BYU Women's Conference. She and her husband Tom, a federal appeals court judge, currently live in Round Hill, VA in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Judge Griffith was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals in June 2005. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Virginia School of Law, Judge Griffith was engaged in private practice from 1985 – 1995 and again in 1999, first in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was an associate at Robinson, Bradshaw and Hinson, and later in Washington, D.C., where he was an associate and then a partner at Wiley, Rein and Fielding. His primary areas of emphasis were commercial and corporate litigation and government investigations. From 1995 – 99, Judge Griffith was Senate Legal Counsel of the United States. In that capacity, he represented the interests of the Senate in litigation and advised the Senate leadership and its committees on investigations, including the impeachment trial of President Clinton. From 2000 until his appointment to the United States Court of Appeals, Judge Griffith was Assistant to the President and General Counsel of Brigham Young University. In 1999 – 2000, Judge Griffith was General Counsel to the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce, a congressional commission created to study the interplay between tax policy and electronic commerce. In 2002 – 03, Judge Griffith served as a member of the United States Secretary of Education’s Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, which examined the role of Title IX in intercollegiate athletics. Judge Griffith has long been active in the American Bar Association’s Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI). He currently serves on the CEELI Council of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative and on the board of directors of the CEELI Institute in Prague. Since joining the Court, Judge Griffith has taught courses on Presidential Powers and Judicial Process at the Brigham Young University Law School and on the Role of an Article III judge at Stanford Law School.
An award-winning filmmaker with over 20 years experience in the production of historical television documentaries, director and producer Lee B. Groberg has an impressive filmography and a growing list of accolades from the film and television industry.
Groberg received his MBA in international business management in 1977, but found his greater love in documentary filmmaking. He began his film career in 1984, producing industrial films. His first foray into documentary filmmaking began in 1987 when he co-produced a film with NHK Television in Japan. Titled WINTER; The St. Paul-Sapporo Connection, the film compared a U.S. winter carnival in Minnesota with the Yuki Matsuri (Snow Festival) in Sapporo, Japan.
In the subsequent 20 years from that first documentary, Groberg has produced numerous films, mostly for PBS Television. His filmography may be found at GrobergFilms.com
R. Shawn Gunnarson is a shareholder with Kirton McConkie in Salt Lake City, UT. His legal practice includes advising multi-national organizations on Internet policy, and he has been quoted in Financial Times and The Economist on issues of Internet governance. He served as Senior Counsel to US Senator Robert F. Bennett, and as ex officio member of the CSIS Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. Mr. Gunnarson is well-known for his work with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). His many publications include “A Constitutional Solution for Internet Governance” (2013), and “Theorizing Fact-Based Policy Development at ICANN” (2011).
Mr. Gunnarson earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy and political science magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 1991. He then graduated cum laude from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University in 1994.
Ralph Hancock holds a BA from BYU and an MA and PhD from Harvard University, all in political science. Before joining BYU's faculty, Hancock was on the faculty at Hillsdale College and then at the University of Idaho. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Rennes.
Hancock has been a J. Reuben Clark fellow at BYU. He has taught classes related to American and French political history and, more broadly, classes related to the history of political thought.
Hancock edited America, the West and Liberal Education (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). He also edited The Legacy of the French Revolution with Gary Lambert and wrote Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Cornell University Press, 1989). He has also written articles for Square Two, Political Science Reviewer, FARMS Review and First Things, among other publications.
After serving as a speechwriter for The Right Honourable Michael Howard and William Hague, Hannan was elected to the European Parliament at the 1999 election. Hannan joined the European Conservatives and Reformists when it was formed in 2009. Since his election to the parliament, he has twice been voted at the top of his regional list, and currently serves on the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and the delegation to the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly.
Hannan is the Secretary General of the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists and is also the president of Young Britons’ Foundation—an organization that identifies, trains, mentors, and places activists in politics, academia, and the media. In 2009, Hannan gained international attention for his speech directed towards Gordon Brown, receiving over 630,000 views on YouTube in 24 hours.
Besides politics, Hannan is a journalist, currently authoring a blog for The Daily Telegraph and several books including Euro: Bad for Business, The case for EFTA, and What if Britain votes No? He holds an MA of Modern History from Oxford University and is the recipient of various awards for his journalism, speeches, and legislation. In 2009, Hannan was awarded the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for his Telegraph blog, as well as Speech of the Year at the 2009 Spectator Awards. He has been named by The Telegraph as one of the 100 most-influential people on the center-right in the United Kingdom for the last four years, peaking as the tenth-most influential in 2009. Hannan is a highly sought-after orator on both sides of the Atlantic.
Denise Hearn is founder of Denise Hearn LLC — a company that moves resources to companies and organizations that support human and ecological flourishing. Her work focuses on three key pillars: research, deploying capital, and convening the highly resourced with systems change leaders globally. Denise is co-creator of the First Principles Forum, a platform to support and challenge technology company founders who want to use their wealth for good. Denise is also co-author of The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition named one of the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2018 and endorsed by two Nobel Prize winners. Denise has presented at many venues, including the Oxford Union, Bloomberg, and the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club. She has built new impact investment models in Canada, helped create the world’s first Trustmark for Sharing Economy companies in the UK, and was chosen to participate in the Alt/Now: Economic Inequality residency program at the Banff Centre. Denise has an MBA from the Oxford Saïd Business School, where she co-chaired the Social Impact Oxford Business Network, and a BA in International Studies from Baylor University.
Samuel Hill graduated from UVU in 2017 with his BA in History and Political Science, with a minor in Constitutional Studies and an emphasis on American Government. He has served as a teaching assistant, research assistant, and was privileged to be one of the first class of Wood Assistants. While he parents his seven children he is preparing to attend graduate school for political theory and American government. He currently works as Ambassador in the Federalism Index Project, and as one who has seen all that the Center and the Constitutional Studies program has to offer, he is well suited to spreading the news.
Professor Eric A Hinderaker is a professor of history at University of Utah. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Augustana College, a Master of Arts from University of Colorado Boulder, and a Doctorate of Philosophy from Harvard University. Professor Hinderaker has also received the following awards and honors: the Security Pacific Short-Term Fellowship, 2015-16 academic year (Huntington Library, 03/2015); the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History (New York Academy of History, 02/14/2014); Elected Non-Resident Member (Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 09/15/2011); Professor of the Year (Phi Alpha Theta Alpha Rho chapter, 04/28/2011); and the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize (New York State Historical Association, 2009). He has a basic understanding in French and Spanish, and has an interest in the study of the Americas, specifically North America, and the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.
Dr. Lindsay H. Hoffman is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and the Department of Political Science & International Relations at the University of Delaware. She is also the Coordinator of Research in Politics & Technology at the Center for Political Communication. After receiving her PhD from the Ohio State University, Dr. Hoffman joined the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware in September of 2007. She teaches courses in political communication, politics and technology, media effects, and research methods. Her work emphasizes both the social circumstances and psychological predispositions that influence individual media uses and effects.
Dr. Hoffman’s recent research examines how citizens use internet technology to become engaged with politics and their communities. She also studies individual and contextual effects of media on individuals' perceptions of public opinion; the effects of viewing The Daily Show on knowledge and participation; social capital and communication; and factors leading to public-affairs news use. Hoffman’s research also examines the components of mediated messages that encourage individuals to participate in—or distance themselves from—political activities, such as voting, viewing of the news or simply expressing opinion. Her research is theoretically grounded in political communication, mass communication, and public opinion.
Matthew S. Holland is the President of Utah Valley University, where he has been serving since June of 2009.
Before assuming his current position, President Holland was an associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University, where he taught courses in political philosophy and American political thought, including BYU's large general education sections of American Heritage. A popular teacher, his commitment to applied learning concepts led to his selection as BYU's "Civically Engaged Scholar of the Year" in 2008 by Utah Campus Compact. His scholarly research on how ideals of Christian charity influenced the development of American political life garnered national attention. In 2005, he won Princeton University's James Madison Fellowship. In 2007, his book, Bonds of Affection: Civic Charity and the Making of America, was published by Georgetown University Press.
He graduated from Brigham Young University with honors in 1991 and was valedictorian for the political science department. That same year, he was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg Scholarship for a year of graduate study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before going on to earn his master's degree and PhD in political science at Duke University, President Holland served as chief of staff for the top executive of the international consulting firm Monitor Group and, later, as special assistant to Governor Michael O. Leavitt.
Currently, he serves on numerous community boards, including the editorial advisory board of the Deseret News and the boards of the Utah Valley and Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce. He and his wife, Paige, have four children: Jacob, Mitzi, Grace, and Dan.
Carson Holloway is Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska, Omaha and Visiting Scholar in the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics. He is co-editor, with Bradford P. Wilson, of the two-volume work The Political Writings of Alexander Hamilton (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is also the author of Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration: Completing the Founding or Betraying the Founding? (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has been a Visiting Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and a Visiting Fellow in American Political Thought at the Heritage Foundation. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Review of Politics, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and Perspectives on Political Science, and he has written more popular articles for First Things, National Affairs, Public Discourse, American Greatness, Law and Liberty, National Review, and The Federalist. Professor Holloway received his B.A. from the University of Northern Iowa and his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University.
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Huemer received his BA from UC Berkeley in 1992 and his PhD from Rutgers University in 1998. He is the author of more than 70 academic articles in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and metaphysics, as well as six books, including: “Ethical Intuitions," “The Problem of Political Authority," and “Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism” (forthcoming in 2019).
Ernest Istook brings abundant experience and insights to UVU. He served 14 years as United States Congressman, representing the 5th District of Oklahoma. Overall, he served 25 years in public office, including as Congressman, state legislator, city council member, head of a state agency, assistant legal counsel to the governor, and as chairman of the largest library system in Oklahoma. Istook was chosen by voters as the 2006 Republican nominee for Governor of Oklahoma. He is an attorney, a former political reporter and broadcaster.
In Congress, Istook chaired subcommittees that oversaw and funded nationwide transportation systems, major information technology programs, the White House and Executive Office of the President, Treasury Department, Office of National Drug Control Policy, and multiple other major agencies. He served on subcommittees that oversaw and funded national defense, national intelligence, homeland security, health care, medical research, education, the Environmental Protection Agency, public lands, and more.
G. Kevin Jones is an Attorney-Advisor in the Intermountain Regional Office of the Solicitor, United States Department of the Interior, Salt Lake City, Utah. He has received numerous special achievement awards from his work as a DOI attorney. He also supervises the intern program and has mentored over 75 law students, including students from the University of Michigan, New York University, Notre Dame, Wake Forest, Pepperdine, University of Utah, and Brigham Young University.
Dr. Jones was a United States Supreme Court Judicial Fellow in the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, assigned to work with the Federal Courts Study Committee on the Future of the Federal Judiciary (FCSC). The FCSC was appointed by the Chief Justice at the direction of Congress to analyze the federal courts and develop a long-term plan for the federal judicial system. He researched and wrote drafts of FCSC proposals and communicated the FCSC’s ideas to the Federal judiciary for review and comment. He also was a United States Supreme Court Judicial Intern in the Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Chief Justice of the United State Supreme Court, Warren E. Burger.
Dr. Jones graduated with a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude from Brigham Young University in 1974 and received his JD cum laude from the same institution in 1977. He also holds an LLM, or Master of Laws, from the University of Utah and an SJD, or Doctor of Juridical Science, from the University of Virginia, the highest degree awarded for the study of law.
Active in community affairs, Dr. Jones has served as Chairman of the East Bench Community Council. He is admitted to practice law before the Utah Supreme Court, the United States District Court for the District of Utah, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court.
The Honorable Chief Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani was born in Multan, Pakistan. He attended Government Emerson College Multan and Forman Christian College University, where he earned a MS degree in political science. He also obtained an LL. B from Punjab University. He later completed a major in constitutional law from the University of London in the Institute of Advance Legal Studies.
Mr. Jillani served as the 21st Chief Justice of Pakistan from 2013 to 2104.He has been retired since summer 2014. Earlier in his career, he was nominated Justice of the Lahore High Court by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1994. He served as a Justice of the Supreme Court from 2004 till the enforcement of the State of Emergency in 2007. This occurred due to his refusal to take a fresh oath of office. He was forcefully retired and detained from the Supreme Court. After the restoration of democracy in 2009 he rejoined the Supreme Court. Later in 2013 he acted as Chief Election Commissioner. Considered a progressive judge, Mr. Jillani was a strong advocate of civil liberties and fundamental rights, creating changes for women’s rights and right to education.
He has been the recipient of many awards, such as Key of the City of Detroit; The Rule of Law Award (aka the CEELI Award) by the American Bar Association as one among a number of judges of Pakistan demonstrating courage in upholding the rule of law; and an Honorary Chair of the World Justice Project, sharing this honor with other co-chairs including, Honorable Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Honorable Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Honorable Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Honorable Justice Stephen G. Breyer, President Jimmy Carter, Honorable Madeleine Albright, Honorable James A. Baker III and William H. Gates Sr.
Mr. Jillani also wrote the song “Justice for All,” which was sung at the 50th Anniversary of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The song has been declared the Judicial Anthem of Pakistan by the Full Court presided over by the Honorable Chief Justice of Pakistan.
David A. Kaplan is the formal legal affairs editor of Newsweek, where he covered the Supreme Court for a decade. His new book, The Most Dangerous Branch (a national bestseller) is a rare behind-the-scenes look at the current Court, and an argument that it has become too involved in American life. Kaplan interviewed a majority of the justices for the book. The Most Dangerous Branch has been featured on Morning Joe, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, the CBS Morning News, and elsewhere; Kaplan also survived a joint appearance at the Miami Book Fair with Alan Dershowitz. His other books include The Silicon Boys, The Accidental President, and Mine's Bigger (Loeb Award for Best Business Book of 2008). At Newsweek and later Fortune, he wrote 30 cover stories, including profiles of Justices Brennan and Thomas, George Steinbrenner, Howard Schultz, Shaq, David Geffen, and Ralph Nader. Other cover stories of his broke the Hewlett-Packard boardroom spying scandal and revealed fresh details about Bush v. Gore. Kaplan has been teaching courses on the First Amendment law and ethics at New York University for a decade. He is a graduate of Cornell and the NYU School of Law.
Richard B. Katskee, Legal Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Katskee is also an adjunct associate professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law. He previously served as Deputy Director of the Program Legal Group in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (where he led policy initiatives to implement federal antidiscrimination laws in the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities) and as a member of the Supreme Court & Appellate practice at Mayer Brown LLP.
Lane Kenworthy studies the causes and consequences of living standards, poverty, inequality, mobility, employment, economic growth, social policy, taxes, public opinion, and politics in the United States and other affluent countries. His books include The Good Society (thegoodsociety.net), How Big Should Our Government Be? (2016, with Jon Bakija, Peter Lindert, and Jeff Madrick), Social Democratic America (2014), Progress for the Poor (2011), Jobs with Equality (2008), Egalitarian Capitalism (2004), and In Search of National Economic Success (1995).
Dr. Paul E. Kerry is an associate dean of Undergraduate Education, an associate professor in the department of History, and a member of the European Studies faculty at BYU. He researches in German and European intellectual history, transatlantic transmission of ideas, and historiography. He is on the editorial board of Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, the advisory boards of Carlyle Studies Annual and Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and the editorial committee of the Strouse Edition of Carlyle's works published by the University of California Press. He has served as editor for volumes on Schiller, Goethe, Carlyle, Mozart, and Franklin. He wrote a book on Enlightenment thought and Goethe and is completing another monograph on German intellectual history. He has been awarded fellowships at Princeton, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Oxford, where he took his doctorate and was a member of St. John’s College. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Dr. David Kirkham is a senior fellow at the J. Reuben Clark Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies and an associate professor in the BYU Department of Political Science. Prior to joining the BYU faculty in July of 2007, he served as Associate Dean and Professor of International Politics and Democratic Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. He was also an Associate Professor of History, Director of International History, and Director of International Plans and Programs at the United States Air Force Academy. Dr. Kirkham conducted international negotiations and diplomatic activities for several years for the US Government and United Nations, including serving as as Senior Humanitarian Affairs Officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva (with duties primarily in Africa).
Dr. Kirkham has lived fifteen years of his adult life in five European countries (Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium) and has occasionally represented the United States and the UN in nearly fifty nations spread across six continents. He began his career in the early 1980s with a five-year law practice for the US Air Force in England and Washington, DC. Dr. Kirkham's written works and teaching curriculum address international human rights, global democratization, constitutionalism, revolution, diplomacy, and the global challenges posed by ideological extremism. He is currently the editor of State Responses to Minority Religions and co-editor of two books on Islam, law, and politics in Europe. He speaks French and German and holds a PhD from George Washington University and a Juris Doctorate from the J. Reuben Clark Law School. Dr. Kirkham is married to Judith Hunter, and they are the parents of eight children.
Benjamin A. Kleinerman is Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at James Madison College, Michigan State University. Professor Kleinerman received his BA at Kenyon College in Political Science and his PhD at Michigan State University in Political Science. Dr. Kleinerman was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Constitutional Government and a former Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. His research currently focuses on the relationship between executive power and the constitutional order. He has published articles on this subject in Perspectives on Politics (APSA), American Political Science Review, Texas Law Review, and several edited volumes including The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Kleinerman has been invited to give talks at Yale University, the University of Notre Dame, Xavier University, Kenyon College, and the University of Cincinnati. Professor Kleinerman’s first book, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power, was published by the University Press of Kansas and has been reviewed in The New Republic and Political Science Quarterly. He is currently working on a second book that continues the investigation of executive power, currently titled Becoming Commander-in-Chief: A Constitutional Success Story. Dr. Kleinerman teaches classes on political thought and political institutions. He has also published on other subjects, including literature, politics, and American political history.
Ambassador Douglas W. Kmiec is the Caruso Family Chair in Constitutional Law & Human Rights at Pepperdine University School of Law. The former US Ambassador to the Republic of Malta, Ambassador Kmiec was tasked by the President of the United States to initiate and maintain a vital part of the Inter-faith dialogue among the Abrahamic religions of the Mediterranean region as a necessary step towards mutual respect and understanding. Ambassador Kmiec is the author of numerous books and articles, a former Distinguished Fulbright Fellow in Asia, and a White House Fellow. He served as Deputy and then Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Ambassador Kmiec is one of only a few individuals who have received the Distinguished Service Award from two cabinet departments—Housing and Urban Development in 1983 and the Department of Justice in 1987. In 1988, he was awarded the Edmund J. Randolph Award by the US Attorney General. He has lectured on the US Constitution in Asia as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar.
An honors graduate of Northwestern University, Ambassador Kmiec received his law degree from the University of Southern California, where he served on the Law Review and received the Legion Lex Commencement Prize for Legal Writing. He is a member of the bar of the US Supreme Court and the state bars of Illinois and California.
Julius Krein is the editor of American Affairs, a new journal of political thought and policy that he founded in 2017. Previously, he was an investor at leading hedge funds and private equity firms. He graduated from Harvard College in 2008.
Douglas Laycock is the Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He has published many books and articles on religious liberty and other constitutional topics, and articles and two books on the law of remedies. His writings on religious liberty are forthcoming in a five-volume collection from Eerdmans Publishing.
He represented churches and believers in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, City of Boerne v. Flores, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Church and School v. EEOC, and Holt v. Hobbs. He represented citizens opposing government-sponsored prayers in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe and Town of Greece v. Galloway. He played a key role in developing state and federal religious liberty legislation. As these examples illustrate, he is known for defending the liberty of all sides in America’s culture wars.
He is a graduate of Michigan State University and the University of Chicago Law School, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Vice President of the American Law Institute.
Mike Leavitt served as Utah’s governor three times. Prior to leaving the statehouse to work in the Bush Administration, he was the nation's longest-serving governor. During his eleven years of service, Utah was recognized six times as one of America's best managed states. He was chosen by his peers as Chairman of the National Governors Association, Western Governors Association, and Republican Governors Association. Leavitt was sworn in as the 20th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on January 26, 2005.
Secretary Leavitt is widely recognized as a healthcare innovator and welfare reformer, and his record of achievement in Utah bears this out. In 1994, the Utah legislature passed Gov. Leavitt's "Healthprint," a comprehensive, incremental approach to health care improvement in the state.
The application of technology is a passion for Secretary Leavitt. During his tenure as Governor of Utah, the state's website was awarded "Best of Web," offering more than 110 services online. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, he was committed to unleashing the power of technology to improve the quality of care, reduce mistakes and manage costs.
Leavitt graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics and business from Southern Utah University. He served as president and chief executive officer of a regional insurance firm, establishing it as one of the top insurance brokers in America.
Barbara Lee is a professor and the Chair of the Department of Human Resource Management at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, where she teaches employment law and higher education law and has served as department chair, associate dean, associate provost, and dean. Lee serves on the Executive Committee of the New Jersey Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section, is the immediate past chair of the Bar Association’s Higher Education Committee, is a former member of the board of directors of the National Association of College and University Attorneys and an NACUA Fellow, and is vice-chair of the editorial board of The Journal of College & University Law. She is counsel to the law firm of Edwards, Wildman, Palmer & Dodge, LLP, and often serves as an expert witness for litigation involving employment discrimination, sexual harassment, student issues, and academic personnel decisions.
Professor Lee is the author of numerous books and articles on employment law, higher education law, employment discrimination, and academic employment practices. She is the co-author of The Law of Higher Education, 4th ed. (2006), A Legal Guide for Student Affairs Professionals, 2nd ed. (2009, with W. Kaplin), and Academics in Court: The Consequences of Faculty Discrimination Litigation (with George LaNoue). She received her bachelor's degree in English from the University of Vermont, both her master's in English and her doctorate in Higher Education Administration from the Ohio State University, and her Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center.
Elected in 2010, Senator Mike Lee has spent his career defending the basic liberties of Americans and Utahns as a tireless advocate for our founding constitutional principles.
Senator Lee graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Science in Political Science, and served as BYU's Student Body President in his senior year. He graduated from BYU's Law School in 1997 and went on to serve as law clerk to Judge Dee Benson of the US District Court for the District of Utah, and then with future Supreme Court Justice Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Senator Lee spent several years as an attorney with the law firm Sidley & Austin specializing in appellate and Supreme Court litigation, and then served as an Assistant US Attorney in Salt Lake City arguing cases before the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Senator Lee served as Governor Jon Huntsman's General Counsel and was later honored to reunite with Justice Alito, now on the Supreme Court, for a one-year clerkship. He returned to private practice in 2007.
Throughout his career, Senator Lee earned a reputation as an outstanding practitioner of the law based on his sound judgment, abilities in the courtroom, and thorough understanding of the Constitution. Today, Senator Lee fights to preserve America's proud founding document in the United States Senate. He advocates efforts to support constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty, and economic prosperity.
Senator Lee is a member of the Judiciary Committee, and serves as Chairman of the Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Subcommittee protecting business competition and personal freedom. He also oversees issues critical to Utah as the Chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He serves on the Armed Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee, as well.
The late Becky Lockhart was a member of the Utah House of Representatives, representing the state’s 64th District. She was first elected to office in 1998 and became the Assistant Majority Whip in 2008. On November 4, 2010, she was chosen by her colleagues to be Speaker of the House – the first woman in Utah history to hold the top leadership position. Nicknamed “Utah’s Iron Lady” in a Deseret News column, Lockhart dedicated her legislative focus to economic development, infrastructure reform, health care enhancement, technology modernization, and educational excellence. She served as Chair of the Transportation Task Force, the work of which eventually resulted in the finalization of one of the most extensive transportation investments in Utah History.
During her tenure, the state enacted a balanced budget every year, while also strongly investing in Utah’s most critical priorities. Even in the aftermath of a severe national recession, and at a time when most states reduced all major appropriations, Lockhart collaborated with legislative leaders to provide funding for education and ensure the necessary resources would be available for Utah’s schools. In 2014, she crafted a $300 million education modernization initiative that gained praise for its creative approach to the integration of hardware in the hands of students.
Named three times as Legislator of the Year by the Utah Health Insurance Association and a “Friend of Business” by the Utah Business Coalition, Lockhart was also a recipient of Intermountain Health Care’s Beacon of Hope Award. For several terms in office, Lockhart also separately served as a lead legislator in the policy areas of healthcare quality and access and transportation. Lockhart received a BS in Nursing from Brigham Young University.
Nelson Lund is University Professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he has served as Vice Dean and as co-editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review. A graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis, he holds advanced degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of America (M.A. 1978), and in political science from Harvard University (Ph.D. 1981). He received his law degree in 1985 from the University of Chicago, where he was executive editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and chapter president of the Federalist Society.
Professor Lund served as a law clerk for the Honorable Patrick E. Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (1985-1986) and for the Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court (O.T. 1987). In addition to experience in the United States Department of Justice at the Office of the Solicitor General and at the Office of Legal Counsel, Professor Lund served in the White House as Associate Counsel to the President from 1989 to 1992.
Mark Benson Madsen is an American politician and Attorney from Utah. A Republican, he is a member of the Utah State Senate, representing the state's 13th senate district in Utah and Tooele Counties including the city of Lehi. Senator Madsen is the grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower.
Madsen received his bachelor’s degree from George Mason University and his JD from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University.
Madsen started his political career in 1984 when he lived and worked in the Washington, DC area. He began as an intern for Utah Senator Orrin Hatch in January 1984. He then went on to work for lobbying organizations promoting Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and a federal Balanced Budget Amendment. Madsen was elected to City Council in 2001. He was sworn in January 7, 2002. He then ran for State Senate, and was first elected in 2004. Madsen is affiliated with the Federalist Society and the American Leadership Academy in Spanish Fork. Mark Madsen on Wikipedia
In 2014, Madsen served on the following committees:
Executive Offices and Criminal Justice Appropriations Subcommittee
Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee
Senate Education Committee
Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Committee (Chair)
Senate Rules Committee
William (Bill) Marshall is currently the Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina. Marshall was Deputy White House Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States during the Clinton Administration. He has also served as the Solicitor General of the State of Ohio. Marshall has published extensively on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, federal courts, presidential power, federalism, and judicial selection matters. He teaches civil procedure, constitutional law, election law, first amendment, federal courts, freedom of religion, the law of the presidency, and media law. Marshall received his law degree from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a native of Nashua, New Hampshire. "
David McCullough was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a student at Yale, he met the author Thornton Wilder and, after considering careers in politics and in the arts, was inspired to become an author.
After college McCullough moved to New York City and worked as an editorial assistant at Sports Illustrated. He eventually moved to Washington and became an editor and writer at the United States Information Agency. In 1964, he became a full time editor and writer for American Heritage, the publisher he sometimes calls "[his] graduate school."
The unexpected success of his first book, The Johnstown Flood (1968), emboldened him to quit his job and commit to a full time writing career. Since then he has published a series of distinguished works of history and biography, all of which have won enormous popularity with the reading public.
He was awarded his first Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his biography of President Truman, and he is frequently called upon to discuss the presidency in the news media. At the time of his interview with the Academy of Achievement, David McCullough had begun work on a dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As his work on the book progressed, McCullough became increasingly intrigued with the character of John Adams. Convinced that Adams had not received his historic due, McCullough decided to devote his entire book to Adams. The result topped The New York Times bestseller list from the week it went on sale and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
McCullough continued to explore the events and personalities of the revolutionary era in 1776, which focuses tightly on the events of a single year. McCullough's account brings us closer than ever to the familiar figures of the conflict, such as George Washington and King George III. At its publication in 2005, McCullough's 1776 received glowing reviews and became an instant bestseller.
McCullough writes every day in a studio behind his house. "I would pay to do what I do," he told an interviewer. "How could I have a better time than doing what I am doing?"
Peter McNamara is a professor at the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. His research and teaching focus on American political thought, early modern political thought, and political economy. He is the author of “Political Economy and Statesmanship: Smith, Hamilton and the Foundation of the Commercial Republic” and the editor of “The Noblest Minds: Fame, Honor and the American Founding,” and (with Louis Hunt), “Liberalism, Conservatism and Hayek's Idea of Spontaneous Order.” He has written on a wide variety of other topics including Hayek’s moral theory, political opportunism, Jefferson’s federalism, and the intellectual origins of business schools. He has taught at Utah State University, Boston College, and Clemson University, where he was a Hayek Visiting Scholar. He has also worked as a research officer for the Australian Treasury.
Quin Monson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. He received his PhD from the Ohio State University in 2004. Professor Monson’s research and teaching are in public opinion; campaigns, elections, and voting behavior; survey research methods; and religion and politics. He is the co-editor of several books and monographs on congressional and presidential elections, and his research has also appeared in academic journals and edited volumes including Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Political Analysis, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Professor Moore is a scholar of US foreign relations law, international law, and international human rights. His publications have been accepted for publication by the law publications at Harvard, Columbia, Virginia, and Northwestern University, among others. Professor Moore has taught Civil Procedure, International Law, US Foreign Relations Law, International Human Rights, Legal Scholarship, and a Plenary Powers Colloquium. In 2011, he received the Student Bar Association First Year Professor of the Year Award and the University's R. Wayne Hansen Teaching and Learning Fellowship. He is a member of the American Law Institute.
After joining the BYU law faculty in 2008, Professor Moore taught as a visiting professor at the George Washington University Law School. Before joining BYU, Professor Moore clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. during the US Supreme Court’s 2007 Term. From 2003 to 2007, Professor Moore was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. He arrived at the University of Kentucky after researching and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School as an Olin Fellow from 2001 to 2003. From 2000 to 2001, Professor Moore clerked for Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. From 1996 to 2000, he was an Honor Program trial attorney at the US Department of Justice, Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch. Professor Moore is a summa cum laude graduate of Brigham Young University Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and graduated first in his class. He received his BA from Brigham Young University, where he was a Benson Scholar and graduated summa cum laude with University Honors and as co-valedictorian of his college. He and his wife Natalie are the parents of seven wonderful children.
Paul D. Moreno holds the William and Berniece Grewcock Chair in Constitutional History at Hillsdale College and is the director of academic programs at the College’s Kirby Center. He received his BA from the State University of New York and his MA and PhD in history at the University of Maryland. In addition to teaching at Hillsdale for thirteen years, he has held visiting professorships at Princeton University and the University of Paris School of Law. He is the author of Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History and The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism.
Dr. Jeffry Morrison is Director of Academics at the federal government’s James Madison Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia, and Professor of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach. He graduated with distinction from Boston College and from Georgetown University, where he earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in Government. Dr. Morrison has also held faculty appointments at Princeton University, at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and at Georgetown. He has published as author or editor five books on American constitutionalism, including The Political Philosophy of George Washington (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and chapters, articles, and reviews in scholarly publications such as American Political Thought, Journal of American History, and Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. He has lectured at colleges and historic sites throughout the United States and in England (Hertford College, Oxford), and made media appearances on radio, in journalism, and on television (C-Span and the BBC). He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, where his home sits on a Revolutionary War battlefield.
Dr. Jerry Z. Muller, professor of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., is the author of many books, including “Adam Smith in His Time and Ours”, “The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought,” “Capitalism and the Jews,” and most recently “The Tyranny of Metrics,” published by Princeton University Press in February, 2018. His 36-part lecture series, “Thinking about Capitalism,” is available from The Great Courses. His essays on matters of public policy and international affairs include two cover articles in Foreign Affairs: “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism” (2008) and “Capitalism and Inequality: What the Right and the Left Get Wrong” (2013).
Dr. Vincent Phillip Muñoz is the Tocqueville Associate Professor of Religion and Public Life in the Department of Political Science and Concurrent Associate Professor of Law at The University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Muñoz writes and teaches across the fields of political philosophy, constitutional studies, and American politics. His first book, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge University Press, 2009), won the Hubert Morken Award from the American Political Science Association for the best publication on religion and politics in 2009 and 2010. His First Amendment church-state casebook, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents, was published in 2013 and is being used at Notre Dame and other leading universities.
Dr. Muñoz is in the process of completing two more books related to religious freedom: a prequel to God and the Founders, which seeks to uncover the original meaning of the Constitution's Religion Clauses, and a constitutional history of religious freedom in America from the Founding to the present. His writings have appeared in scholarly and popular journals, including American Political Science Review, The Review of Politics, The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, and The Claremont Review of Books.
Bruce Allen Murphy teaches Constitutional Law, American Politics and biographical writing as the Fred Morgan Kirby Professor of Civil Rights at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. He is the author of several judicial biographies including Scalia: A Court of One, published by Simon and Schuster in 2014. His other books include The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices (Oxford University Press, 1982) which became the subject of a national debate about extrajudicial ethics as the result of a front page story in the Sunday New York Times. His Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice (William Morrow, 1988) and later Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas, (Random House, 2003) explored the political activities of both men while serving on the bench. Murphy's work has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and he is a recipient of several writing, researching, and teaching awards, including a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Robert Nagel joined the faculty of Colorado Law School in 1975, leaving a position as a deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania. Since that time, he has focused on constitutional law and theory. For an audience of legal scholars, Professor Nagel has written prolifically, including four books and over fifty law review articles. He has also contributed to the popular debate on constitutional issues—including free speech, hate codes, and federalism—by addressing his ideas to the general citizenry in articles and opinion pieces in publications such as The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, First Things, and the Weekly Standard. Much of his work has focused on the relationship between the judiciary (and its interpretation of the Constitution) and the wider context of American political culture. Professor Nagel has testified before several congressional committees. He was formerly the director of the Colorado Law School’s Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law. In 2003, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Robert G. Natelson is a nationally known constitutional scholar and author whose research into the history and legal meaning of the Constitution has been cited repeatedly at the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appeals courts, and state supreme courts—both by parties and by U.S. and state Supreme Court justices and by federal appellate judges. He is widely acknowledged to be the country’s leading active scholar on the Constitution’s amendment procedure and among the leaders on several other topics. He was a law professor for 25 years, serving at three different universities, where among other subjects he taught Constitutional Law, Constitutional History, Advanced Constitutional Law, and First Amendment. Professor Natelson’s articles and books span many different parts of the Constitution, including groundbreaking studies of the Necessary and Proper Clause, federalism, Founding-Era interpretation, regulation of elections, and the amendment process of Article V.
John Newman is Chair of the UVU Department of Theatrical Arts for Stage and Screen and served as Director of the Theatre for Youth and Education (TYE) Center for nine years. He earned his M.A. from the University of Texas and his Ph.D. from New York University. He is co-author of Tell Your Story: The Plays and Playwriting of Sandra Fenichel Asher and the recently released book, Playwriting in Schools: Dramatic Navigation. As a solo performer, he performed Leonard Nimoy’s Vincent and has been performing his own solo play, The Man Behind the Curtain: An Evening with L. Frank Baum in ten states over the last three years, including off-off-Broadway at the United Solo Festival on 42nd Street. Dr. Newman has cultivated a life-long interest in the lives of John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks has served as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since May 1984. He was born on August 12, 1932, in Provo, Utah. He and his late wife, June Dixon Oaks, are the parents of six children. She died July 21, 1998. On August 25, 2000, he married Kristen M. McMain.
Oaks is a former Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and lawyer at the firm Kirtland & Ellis in Chicago. A graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Chicago Law School, Elder Oaks has been an officer or member of the board of many businesses and educational and charitable organizations. He is also the author or co-author of many books and articles on religious and legal subjects. In May 2013, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty awarded him the Canterbury Medal for "courage in the defense of religious liberty."
On April 16, 2014, the Center for Constitutional Studies conferred its highest award of Honorary Fellow upon Oaks. Upon receiving this award, he said, “I feel inadequate to follow David McCullough, but I feel greatly honored. Maybe the analogy that occurs to me is how John Adams must have felt following George Washington; honored with the same office, but he wasn’t the father of our country. But I do feel very grateful for what has been said, and for the distinction of being an honorary fellow for the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University. Thank you, my friends.”
Robert O’Harrow Jr. is a reporter on the Investigative Unit of the Washington Post. During two decades at the Post, he has won multiple journalism awards, including the top prize from Investigative Reporters and Editors for a series about government contracting fraud, waste, and abuse. O’Harrow has twice been a Pulitzer Prize journalist, most recently in 2009 for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crisis. He has appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and is the author of the 2005 book, No Place to Hide, about data profiling, surveillance, and national security. O’Harrow was also co-producer of a radio documentary by the same name. In 2003, he won the Carnegie Mellon Cybersecurity Award.
Professor Nathan B. Oman earned a BA in political science from Brigham Young University and JD from Harvard Law School, where he was on the Articles Committee of the Harvard Law Review.
Professor Oman has been an assistant professor at the Marshall-Wythe School of Law at the College of William & Mary since 2006. His primary research interest is in contract law and the philosophy of private law more generally. Prior to law school, Professor Oman worked on the staff of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. After law school, Professor Oman clerked for the Honorable Morris Sheppard Arnold on the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit and practiced law in the Washington, DC office of Sidley Austin LLP.
Among his many scholarly publications are: “International Legal Experience and the Mormon Theology of the State, 1945-2012,” 100 Iowa L. Rev. 715 (2015); “Need for a Law of Church and Market,” 64 Duke L.J. Online __ (forthcoming 2015); “Markets as a Moral Foundation for Contract Law,” 98 Iowa L. Rev. 183 (2012); “How to Judge Sharia Contracts: A Guide to Islamic Marriage Contracts in American Courts,” 2011 Utah L. Rev. 287 (2011); and “Preaching to the Court House and Judging in the Temple,” 2009 BYU L. Rev. 157 (2009).
Robert O’Neil is the former president of the University of Virginia, where he is also an emeritus professor of law. After earning an undergraduate degree in American History (1956) and a master's degree (1957) at Harvard College, he graduated from the Harvard Law School (1961). The following year, he served as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court. Immediately thereafter, O’Neil taught for a decade at the law school of the University of California-Berkeley before entering academic administration as Executive Assistant to then President Martin Meyerson of the University at Buffalo. He has also served as the Founding Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center, the President of the University of Wisconsin System (1979-85), the Chancellor and Vice President of Bloomington of Indiana University, and Provost of the University of Cincinnati. Throughout his administrative duties, O’Neil continued to teach at least one course in Constitutional Law.
A prolific author, Professor O’Neil has written numerous law articles and books. Among his several books are: The Price of Dependency (Dutton 1970); Discriminating Against Discrimination (Indiana 1979); Free Speech in the College Community (Indiana 1997); and Academic Freedom in the Wired World (Harvard 2008). He has also written numerous articles on a wide range of legal subjects.
Michael Paulsen received his BA with distinction from Northwestern University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received an MA in religion from Yale Divinity School and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and a recipient of the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for appellate advocacy. After graduation from law school, he joined the Department of Justice in the Criminal Division Honors Program, and has also served as staff counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom in Washington, DC, and as an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel.
Prior to teaching at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, Paulsen served as the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law and Public Policy, Briggs and Morgan Professor of Law, and Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship at the University of Minnesota Law School. Professor Paulsen is among the nation's leading scholars of constitutional interpretation, and his publications include articles in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Chicago Law Review, NYU Law Review, Texas Law Review, California Law Review, and the Georgetown Law Journal, among many others.
Dr. Deborah Peel is a medical professional and the founder of Patient Privacy Rights. After graduating with a pre-medical degree from the University of Texas at Austin, she received her MD and completed a residency at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Later, she graduated from the Dallas Psychoanalytic Institute. Dr. Peel is a practicing physician and Freudian psychoanalyst. She is one of the world’s leading advocates for patients’ rights to control the use of personal health information in electronic systems, and has been petitioning for patient rights since 1993. She has seen success in drawing attention to important patient privacy concerns, and has testified before congressional committees on genetic data privacy and medical record privacy. Dr. Peel has dedicated much of her life to informing the public about privacy-enhancing technologies and the reformations that are needed in law and policy to restore civil and human rights to health information privacy.
In 2004, Dr. Peel formed Patient Privacy Rights (PPR), a non-profit organization created to educate Americans about the urgent need to restore patient control over health data. In 2006, she founded the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy. Since 2007, she has been included in Modern Healthcare magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” four times, and in 2013, she was named one of the “Top Ten Influencers in Health InfoSec” by healthcareinfosecurity.com. Dr. Peel is the catalyst and creator of annual International Summits on the Future of Health Privacy. The International Summits is the only venue where national and international experts from advocacy, academia, government, and industry come together and debate urgent threats to health privacy and realistic solutions.
Joe Postell is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. He is the author of Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State's Challenge to Constitutional Government, and the co-editor of two books, Rediscovering Political Economy, and Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era.
Eimi Priddis is a graduate of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, where she was a fellow and a member of the Student Management Board for the International Center for Law and Religion Studies. She completed an internship at the office of the Area Legal Counsel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Frankfurt, Germany and contributed significantly to the treatise Religious Organizations and the Law (Bassett, Durham & Smith, Thomson West Publishing, annual). She speaks Japanese, Turkish, and German, and she holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in the fields of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and English Language. She worked last year as a teacher and lecturer at Zirve University in Gaziantep, Turkey, where she taught courses in both Human Rights and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). She currently works locally as a legal writer and trademark attorney.
Ralph A. Rossum is the Henry Salvatori Professor of American Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College and a member of the faculty of Claremont Graduate University. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is the author or co-author of twelve books (including American Constitutional Law, a two-volume work soon available in the tenth edition, Westview, 2017, Antonin Scalia’s Jurisprudence: Text and Tradition, University Press of Kansas, 2006, The Supreme Court and Tribal Gaming: California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, University Press of Kansas, 2011), Understanding Clarence Thomas: The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Restoration, University Press of Kansas, 2014, and over 70 book chapters and articles in law reviews and professional journals.
Mr. Rossum served as Deputy Director for Data Analysis of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice. He has also served as a member of the Advisory Board of the National Institute of Corrections in the Department of Justice, as a member of the National Board of the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education in the Department of Education, and as a member of the California Advisory Committee, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Jack Rakove's principal areas of interest include the origins of the American Revolution and Constitution, the political theories and practices of James Madison, and the role of historical knowledge in constitutional litigation. He is the author of four books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1997. In this work, Rakove argues that originalism, the practice of interpreting the Constitution by a fixed set of the original framers’ intentions, should not be the only approach to settling today's judicial questions.
He joined the Stanford faculty in 1980. After earning his PhD in 1975 from Harvard University, he taught at Colgate University from 1975 to 1980, and has also been a visiting professor at the NYU School of Law. He is also the author of The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive Historyof the Continental Congress(1979), James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (2001), and Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (1997).
Following 9/11, Secretary Thomas Ridge became the first assistant to the President for Homeland Security and, on January 24, 2003, became the first Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security. He served in this capacity until February 1, 2005. Before the events of September 11th, Secretary Ridge was twice elected Governor of Pennsylvania. He served as the state’s 43rd governor from 1995 to 2001.
After his first year at Penn State University's Dickinson School of Law, he was drafted into the US Army, where he served as an infantry staff sergeant in Vietnam, earning the Bronze Star for Valor, the Combat Infantry Badge and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. Secretary Ridge was elected to congress in 1982, and was re-elected by Pennsylvania voters five times.
Secretary Ridge serves on the boards of the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and other private and public entities, and since 2005, has served as chairman of the National Organization on Disability. He continues to contribute to matters concerning our nation’s veterans and serves as national co-chairman of the Flight 93 Memorial Fundraising Campaign.
Throughout his public and private sector career, Tom Ridge has received numerous honors, including the Woodrow Wilson Award, the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ Dwight D. Eisenhower Award, the John F. Kennedy National Award, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the American Bar Association’s John Marshall Award, the National Guard’s Harry S. Truman Award, the Pennsylvania Wildlife Federation’s Conservationist of the Year Award, US-Mexico Chamber of Commerce’s Good Neighbor Award, the American Cancer Society’s prestigious National Medal of Honor, the Mister Rogers Award, the Champion of Public Television Award, the Intrepid Freedom Award and the Esperanza Leadership Award. Secretary Ridge has also been awarded honorary degrees and awards from many national and international academic institutions.
Mark L. Rienzi is an associate professor at The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law. Professor Rienzi teaches constitutional law, religious liberty, torts, and evidence. He was voted Teacher of the Year for 2011 and 2012 by the Law School's Student Bar Association.
Professor Rienzi's litigation and research interests focus on the First and Fourteenth Amendments, with an emphasis on free speech and the free exercise of religion. He is currently serving as counsel in several constitutional cases across the country.
Professor Rienzi is also Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, non-partisan religious liberties law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious faiths. At the Becket Fund, Professor Rienzi is counsel in several challenges to the HHS Mandate.
Professor Rienzi's latest article, “The Constitutional Right Not to Kill” appeared last year in the Emory Law Journal. The piece is a follow up to “The Constitutional Right to Refuse: Roe, Casey, and the Fourteenth Amendment Rights of Healthcare Providers,” which was the lead article in the Notre Dame Law Review's 2011-2012 volume.
Professor Rienzi is widely sought after as a speaker on constitutional issues, particularly concerning abortion and the First Amendment. Professor Rienzi has been invited to discuss these issues at Harvard Law School, Columbia University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Notre Dame Law School, the National Press Club, and the Capitol. His writings on constitutional issues have appeared in The New York Times, Roll Call, National Review Online, The New York Daily News, The Chicago Sun-Times, and the National Catholic Register.
Prior to joining the faculty at CUA, Professor Rienzi served as counsel in the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group at Wilmer Hale LLP. Prior to joining Wilmer Hale, he served as law clerk to the Hon. Stephen F. Williams, senior circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Professor Rienzi was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He earned his BA from Princeton University and JD from Harvard Law School, both with honors.
Naomi Riley is a weekly columnist for the New York Post and a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer whose work focuses on higher education, religion, philanthropy and culture. She is the author of many books, most recently, Got Religion?: How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back (Templeton Press, 2014) and Opportunity and Hope: Transforming Children's Lives through Scholarships (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
Ms. Riley's writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the LA Times, and the Washington Post, among other publications. She appears regularly on Fox News. She is the co-editor of Acculturated (Templeton Press, 2010), a book of essays on pop culture and virtue.
She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in English and Government. She lives in the suburbs of New York with her husband, Jason, and their three children.
Marc Rotenberg is President and Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC. He teaches information privacy law and litigation under the federal open government laws at Georgetown University Law Center, and testifies frequently before congress on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues, such as access to information, encryption policy, consumer protection, computer security, and communications privacy.
Marc Rotenberg is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School, and received an LLM in international and comparative law from Georgetown University Law Center. He served as counsel to Senator Patrick J. Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee after graduation from law school. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and the recipient of several awards including the World Technology Award in Law, the Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, the American Lawyer Top Lawyers Under 45, and the Vicennial Medal (2012) from Georgetown University. A tournament chess player, Rotenberg is a three-time Washington, DC Chess Champion and works to promote chess in the DC public schools in cooperation with the US Chess Center, the recipient of the 2012 USCF National Scholastic Service Award.
Mr. Gene Schaerr began law practice in 1987 following clerkships on the US Supreme Court (for Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice Antonin Scalia) and on the US Court of Appeals for the DC 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.
Mr. Schaerr was a coordinator of Sidley Austin’s appellate practice from 1993 until 2005; from 2005 until 2014, he was the chair of the nationwide appellate practice at Winston & Strawn. 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 constitutional law, but also administrative, antitrust, arbitration, class certification, contract, defamation, higher education, immigration, insurance coverage, labor and employment, patent and trademark, privacy, product liability and warranty, statutory interpretation, and tax law. He has represented clients in virtually every sector, including automotive, communications, energy, financial services, healthcare, 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 Brigham Young University.
Harry N. Scheiber is the Stefan Riesenfeld Professor of Law and History in the Boalt Hall School of Law. Scheiber has written extensively in American legal history, especially on the history of law and public policy, on federalism, and on constitutional development. He has also led research projects and written on aspects of environmental law, especially Law of the Sea and ocean resources policy. Other research has been in the fields of modern judicial reform, Japanese-U.S. relations and ocean policy, and Japanese fisheries law and development. He has served as a consultant to the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Research Council on marine environmental issues and fisheries law; to the federal government's Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations; and to the State of California on the history curriculum in the schools. His most recent books are Freedom of Contract and the State (1998), The Law of the Sea (2000), Inter-Allied Conflicts and Ocean Law [The Japanese Occupation Era] (2002), and Bringing New Law to Ocean Waters (2004). With Jane L. Scheiber, he is co-author of forthcoming study of martial law and the U.S. Army's rule in Hawaii during World War II. He has also written recently on the California Supreme Court, on modern federal-state relations and constitutional law, and on civil liberties and civil rights in American history.
He is a graduate of Columbia and holds the doctorate in history from Cornell University; he did postdoctoral work in law while a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and in 1998 he was awarded the honorary Jur.D. from Uppsala University, Sweden. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was twice a Guggenheim Fellow. Scheiber taught at Dartmouth from 1960 through 1971, and then became a professor of American history at UC San Diego. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1980. In 2000-01, Scheiber has served as associate dean of the School of Law (Boalt Hall), chair of the Jurisporuidence and Social Policy Program, and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society. He has also served as Chair of the Berkeley Faculty's Academic Senate. Scheiber has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council fellowships. He was a Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer in Australia, and he has been president of the Agricultural History Society, the Council for Research in Economic History, the ACLU of New Hampshire, and the American Society for Legal History. He was elected in 1999 as an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
David W. Scott is a professor at Utah Valley University in the Department of Communications, where he teaches media law and free expression classes. Scott received his Ph.D. in Communication Law from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining UVU, he taught at the University of South Carolina and Southern New Hampshire University. Scott has written and co-written a number of papers, one of which is notable for its receival of the Top Paper Award at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Colloquium in 1999. His research focuses on the First Amendment and freedom of speech as well as mediated communication and religion as a cultural practice.
Andrew Shankman received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Rutgers University-Camden, Senior Research Associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and editor of the Journal of the Early Republic. He is the author of Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, and Original Intents: Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the American Founding and the editor of The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Struggle for A Continent and Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic. He has published sixteen essays on revolutionary era and early national U.S. history and his article “A New Thing on Earth: Alexander Hamilton, Pro-Manufacturing Republicans, and the Democratization of American Political Economy” received the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEASE) best article prize and the Ralph D. Gray Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic for best article published in the Journal of the Early Republic.
Patrick Shea is currently a research professor of biology at the University of Utah and a private attorney based in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to his many years of practicing law and teaching, Pat is a distinguished public servant. He served as Director of the Bureau of Land Management in the Clinton Administration and has also worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee and Foreign Relations Committee and the President’s Commission on Aviation Safety, Security, and Air Traffic Control. A Utah native, Pat has a deep personal interest in the rural west. He has taught classes on agronomy, environmental justice and the biology of urban streams. Prior to launching his private practice, Pat was a partner at VanCott Bagley, Cornwall and McCarthy and served as General Counsel for KUTV. Pat holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School.
Carrie Severino is chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network. In that capacity she has testified before Congress on assorted constitutional issues and briefed Senators on judicial nominations. Mrs. Severino has been extensively quoted in the media and regularly appeared on television, including MSNBC, FOX, CNN, C-SPAN and ABC’s This Week. She has written and spoken on a wide range of judicial issues, particularly the constitutional limits on government, the federal nomination process, and state judicial selection. Mrs. Severino regularly files briefs in high-profile Supreme Court cases. In the 2015 term she filed amicus curiae briefs in Evenwel v. Abbott, Fisher v. Texas, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, and United States v. Texas. Until March 2010, Mrs. Severino was an Olin/Searle Fellow and a Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. She was previously a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School, cum laude, of Duke University, and holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics from Michigan State University.
Dr. Sheehan's experience as a Pennsylvania state representative gives her views on government and politics exceptional relevance. She is an authority on President James Madison and Republicanism. Dr. Sheehan would be a particularly good source for stories on the inner workings of government and the history and current status of the Republican Party. An avid reader of the works of author Jane Austen, Dr. Sheehan has also written extensively about the enduring novelist.
Jan Shipps is the Professor Emerita of History and Religious Studies and Senior Research Associate for the POLIS Center (1995-present) at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis. She received her B.S. from Utah State University in 1961, her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Colorado in 1962 and 1965, respectively. Dr. Shipps’ academic Interests include history of American religion, religions in the making, religion in urban America, and Mormonism. She has received the Liberal Arts Outstanding Faculty Award (1985) and the Grace Arrington Mormon Studies Award (1986), and has served as the Glenn W. Irwin Research Scholar (1989-90) and Franklin College Brannigan Scholar (1994). Her numerous publications include: Sojourner in the Promised Land (forthcoming), (editor) Journals of William E. McLellin (1994), Mormonism: The Story of A New Religious Tradition (1985), and numerous other articles on Mormonism.
Hannah Smith is the Senior Counsel at The Becket Fund. She has been with The Becket Fund since 2007, after two clerkships at the US Supreme Court for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Since joining The Becket Fund, Hannah has been a member of the legal team that secured victories in crucial US Supreme Court religious liberty cases including: Holt v. Hobbs, 574 US ___ (Jan. 20, 2015); Burwell v. Hobby Lobby 134 S. Ct. 2751 (June 30, 2014); and Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 132 S. Ct. 694 (2012). Hannah served as a full-time volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in France and Switzerland. She currently serves as a member of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society International Board and as a member of the Deseret News Editorial Advisory Board. She writes a regular column on religious liberty issues in the Deseret News.
Hannah received her BA from Princeton University, concentrating in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She graduated from Brigham Young University Law School and was elected to the Order of the Coif. She served as Executive Editor of the BYU Law Review, as a research assistant for the BYU International Center for Law and Religion Studies, and as president of the BYU Federalist Society. BYU awarded her its Alumni Achievement Award in 2013.
Rodney K. Smith received his B.A. from Western Colorado State College, his J.D. with honors from Brigham Young University, and his LL.M and Doctorate (SJD) from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Smith also holds honorary doctorates from Capital University and Southern Virginia University. He currently serves as a Professor of Practice and Director of the Sports Law and Business Program at Arizona State University. Professor Smith also served as dean of the schools of law at Capital University, the University of Montana, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and as President at Southern Virginia University. Professor Smith also held the Herff Chair of excellence in law at the University of Memphis and has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Professor Smith is the author of numerous books and more than twenty-five scholarly articles. He is recognized for his scholarship in the freedom of religion and sports law areas. He also writes for the opinion sections many newspapers, including USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, Washington Times, Houston Chronicle, Commercial Appeal (Memphis), Union Tribune (San Diego), Arizona Republic, and the Deseret News (Salt Lake City). He also appears as a commentator on radio and television programs.
Troy E. Smith is professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University-Hawai’i. Concurrently, he is also a fellow at the Center for the Study of Federalism and the editor of Federalism in America: An Encyclopedia. He first became interested in federalism when his east coast graduate friends argued for reintroducing wolves in the Rocky Mountains but opposed their reintroduction in the Adirondacks. His interest spiked when, as an intern with the U.S. Senate, he watched quarrels between his senators and the governor. Channeling his insights, he wrote a paper on how members of Congress respond to lobbying by state officials that won the “Best Paper in Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations” at the 1998 A.P.S.A. Annual Meeting. Since then his academic work has appeared in Publius: The Journal of Federalism; The Review of Politics; Congress & the Presidency; Thinking Skills & Creativity; and others. Dr. Smith loves learning and tackling challenges whether that be teaching students about federalism, writing, and reasoning, climbing cliff faces, playing classical guitar, or enticing Hawai’i’s fish to end up on his spear. Dr. Smith received a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany, and an M.A. from George Washington University.
Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy. He is the author of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford University Press, revised and expanded second edition, 2016), and The Grasping Hand: Kelo v. City of New London and the Limits of Eminent Domain (University of Chicago Press, 2015, rev. paperback ed., 2016), coauthor of A Conspiracy Against Obamacare: The Volokh Conspiracy and the Health Care Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Somin’s work has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Critical Review, and others. Somin has also published articles in a variety of popular press outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, CNN, USA Today, US News and World Report, South China Morning Post, Legal Times, National Law Journal and Reason. Somin writes regularly for the popular Volokh Conspiracy law and politics blog, now affiliated with Reason magazine.
Lance Sorenson is the Olin-Darling Fellow in Constitutional Law at Stanford Law School where he teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional history, tribal sovereignty and public lands. He has published multiple law review articles in constitutional law and is the author of a forthcoming book entitled The Transformation of American Federalism, which discusses the ways westward expansion modified the United States system of divided government. He is particularly interested in the Constitution’s structural protections for individual and institutional liberty. He holds a law degree from Pepperdine University and a Ph.D. in Constitutional History from UNLV.
Dr. James Staab is a professor of Political Science at the University of Central Missouri. He received his B.A. from Roanoke College, his J.D. from the University of Richmond, and his Ph. D. from the University of Virginia. His primary field of interest is public law, broadly defined, including American constitutional law, civil rights and liberties, judicial politics, and jurisprudence. He has authored or co-authored articles or book chapters onvarious Supreme Court justices, including Levi Woodbury, Benjamin Cardozo, and Antonin Scalia. In 2006, he published a book on Justice Scalia titled The Political Thought of Justice Antonin Scalia: A Hamiltonian on the Supreme Court (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield). He is currently working on a book examining originalism as an interpretative philosophy of the Constitution. He received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Education in 2012 and the Byler Award in 2014.
Michael Tanner heads research into a variety of domestic policies with a particular emphasis on poverty and social welfare policy, health care reform, and Social Security. He is also the author of numerous books on public policy. Under Tanner's direction, Cato launched the Project on Social Security Choice, which is widely considered the leading impetus for transforming the soon-to-be-bankrupt system into a private savings program. Time Magazine calls him, "one of the architects of the private accounts movement," and Congressional Quarterly named him one of the nation's five most influencial experts on Social Security. His writings have appeared in nearly every major American newspaper, and he writes a weekly column for National Review Online and is a contributing columnist with the New York Post. A prolific writer and frequent guest lecturer, Tanner appears regularly on network and cable news programs.
Alan G. Tarr is the Director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Camden. He serves as editor of State Constitutions of the United States, a 50 volume reference series (Greenwood Press) and as co-editor, with Robert Williams, of "Subnational Constitutions" for the International Encyclopedia of Laws (Kluwer). He is co-editor of the three-volume State Constitutions for the Twenty-first Century (State University of New York Press), of Constitutional Origins, Structure, and Change in Federal Countries (McGill-Queen's), and of Federalism, Subnational Constitutions, and Minority Rights (Praeger). He is the author of Understanding State Constitutions (Princeton University Press) and Judicial Process and Judicial Policymaking (Wadsworth); he is also the co-author of State Supreme Courts in State and Nation, (Yale University Press) and of American Constitutional Law, (Wadsworth). He served as editor and contributor to Constitutional Politics in the States (Greenwood) and Federalism and Rights, (Rowman & Littlefield). Tarr is three times the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; and he has lectured on state constitutionalism throughout the United States and on subnational constitutionalism and federalism in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America.
Professor Jonathan Turley is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law, legal theory, and tort law. He has written over three dozen academic articles that has appeared in a variety of leading law journals at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and other schools.
After a stint at Tulane Law School, Professor Turley joined the George Washington faculty in 1990 and, in 1998, was given the prestigious Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, the youngest chaired professor in the school’s history. In addition to his extensive publications, Professor Turley has served as counsel in some of the most notable cases in the last two decades including the representation of whistleblowers, military personnel, judges, members of Congress, and a wide range of other clients. He is also one of the few attorneys to successfully challenge both a federal and a state law — leading to courts striking down the federal Elizabeth Morgan law as well as the state criminalization of cohabitation.
In 2010, Professor Turley represented Judge G. Thomas Porteous in his impeachment trial. After a trial before the Senate, Professor Turley argued both the motions and gave the final argument to all 100 US Senators from the well of the Senate floor — only the 14th time in history of the country that such a trial of a judge has reached the Senate floor.
Nicholas Vincent is a Professor of Medieval History at the College of East Anglia and is currently leading the Magna Carta Project, a landmark investigation into Magna Carta of 1215 and Magna Carta of 1225. He was selected as a fellow of the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2010 for his distinguished work on the history of medieval Europe, particularly his work on kingship, charters and relics within the Anglo-French world of the 12th and 13th centuries. His contributions to the U.K. Magna Carta Project include an exhaustive search of archives across Britain, Ireland, and France, in the course of which he has discovered two previously unidentified original exemplars of Magna Carta.
Professor Vincent has also published numerous books and academic articles on various aspects of English and European history in the 12th and 13th centuries for both popular and scholarly audiences, including work on the English and European context of Magna Carta. His many notable works include: Magna Carta: A Very Short Introduction (2012), “The Magna Carta (2013),” “English Liberties, Magna Carta (1215) and the Spanish Connection” (2011), “Who’s Who in Magna Carta Clause 50” (2004), “The Murderers of Thomas Becket” (2003), and “Some Pardoners’ Tales: The Earliest English Indulgences” (2002). Professor Nicholas Vincent was educated at Oxford, and has held positions in Cambridge, Canterbury, Paris, and Poitiers.
Christopher Vizcardo is a recent graduate of Utah Valley University. He was born in the Andean city of Huaraz, Peru. His family moved to Utah when he was a child where he has lived ever since. From 2014-16 he served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New England. He was an intern in the Utah House of Representatives during the 2018 Legislative session. He was also the lead project researcher for the modelling of the Utah Constitutional Convention and 13th Amendment Debates for the Quill Platform in conjunction with UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies. He speaks both Spanish and English and enjoys learning about Latin American history and culture. Currently he is an intern at the Washington, D.C. office of Senator Mike Lee. He hopes to go on to law school to continue his study of constitutional issues.
Eugene Volokh is The Gary T. Schwarz Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he currently teaches free speech law, tort law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic at UCLA school of Law. Before coming to UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of the United States Supreme Court, and prior to that, clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Professor Volokh is the author of the textbooks: The First Amendment and Related Statutes (5th ed. 2013), The Religion Clauses and Related Statutes (2005), and Academic Legal Writing (4th ed. 2010), as well as over 75 law review articles and over 80 op-eds. He is a member of The American Law Institute, a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a Weblog that gets about 35-40,000 page views per weekday. He is among the five most cited then-under-45 faculty members listed in the Top 25 Law Faculties in Scholarly Impact, 2005-2009 study, and among the forty most cited faculty members on that list without regard to age. Six of his law review articles have been cited by opinions of the United States Supreme Court, 29 of his works have been cited by federal circuit courts, and several others have been cited by district courts or state courts.
Volokh is an academic affiliate for Mayer Brown LLP law firm, and has argued before the Seventh Circuit, the Ninth Circuit, the Indiana Supreme Court, and the Nebraska Supreme Court, and has filed briefs in the United States Supreme Court, and in the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Eleventh, and DC Circuits, and state appellate courts in California, Michigan, New Mexico, and Texas. After receiving his bachelor’s degree (at age 15) in math-computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, he later went on to complete his Juris Doctorate at the same university. Born in the USSR, Volokh and his family emigrated to the US when he was seven years old.
Douglas Walker joins the conference from sunny Birmingham, Alabama, where he joined the Samford University political science department in August 2019 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. He currently teaches classes in the Great Books program and political philosophy. Prior to joining Samford, he was Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught classes in Federalism and Guns Rights and the Second Amendment. Dr. Walker’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of federalism, American constitutional law, and political theory. His book manuscript, entitled Contestational Federalism, is currently under review. In this work, he defends a novel view of federalism, “contestational federalism,” which asserts that federal boundaries are best defined and protected by arming both levels of government with checks and balances with which to defend their jurisdiction—rather than by means of informal political processes or judicial intervention. He has also published on federalism and the Second Amendment and on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of civil religion and religious toleration. Dr. Walker holds an M.A. in History from Georgia Southern University (2011) and a Ph.D in Political Science from Michigan State University (2017). He and his wife, Elizabeth, have a five-month-old son, Henry. In his (now limited) free time, Dr. Walker enjoys playing strategy board games, watching and playing sports—especially Auburn football—and reading books on history, philosophy, and religion.
Dr. Lee Ward is Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. Before joining Baylor in 2017 he was Alpha Sigma Nu Distinguished Professor of Political Science in Campion College at the University of Regina. He received a BA from the University of Toronto, an MA from Brock University in St. Catharine’s, Ontario, and a Ph.D. from Fordham University in New York City. He is the author of The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America (Cambridge, 2004), John Locke and Modern Life (Cambridge, 2010), Modern Democracy and the Theological-Political Problem in Spinoza, Rousseau and Jefferson (Palgrave McMillan, 2014) and is editor of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Hackett Publishing, 2016). He has published articles on John Locke, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Algernon Sidney, Plato, Spinoza, Rousseau, Irish republicanism and the liberal theory of secession in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; these have appeared in several leading academic journals including the American Political Science Review, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, the American Journal of Political Science, Ratio Juris: An International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy the Canadian Political Science Review, International Philosophical Quarterly, and American Political Thought.
Jennifer L. Weber (PhD Princeton, 2003) studies the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. Her work is noted for its examination of how military, political, and social forces affected each other during the war, making her scholarship unusually holistic in its approach. Her first book, Copperheads, looked at the anti-war Democrats in the North and changed our understanding of the political pressures that Lincoln faced. Her second book, Summer’s Bloodiest Days, is a children’s book about the Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath. The National Council for the Social Studies named it a notable book of 2011. Professor Weber is currently working on a biography of the agency that administered and enforced the Union Draft, and what that bureau’s experience illuminates about the growing size and power of government during the war and changing social norms.
Sonja R. West is the Otis Brumby Distinguished Professor of First Amendment Law at the University of Georgia School of Law, a post shared with the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her scholarship focuses on issues involving the First Amendment and the United States Supreme Court and has appeared in top legal journals such as the Harvard Law Review, the California Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. In recognition of her scholarship, West was awarded the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's 2017 Harry W. Stonecipher Award for Distinguished Research on Media Law and Policy and the National Communication Association's 2016 Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression. A graduate of the University of Chicago School of Law, Professor West served as a law clerk for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She is a former reporter and spent several years practicing media law with the Los Angeles law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Davis Wright Tremaine.
Louise Wilkinson is a Professor of Medieval History at Canterbury Christ Church University. She is also a co-investigator on the U.K. Magna Carta Project, exploring the Charter’s clauses on inheritance, women, and the family. Additionally, Professor Wilkinson is a joint general editor of the Pipe Roll Society (with Dr. Paul Dryburgh) and a co-director of the AHRC funded Henry III Fine Rolls Project (based at King's College London and The National Archives). During her academic career, Professor Wilkinson has published numerous articles and books on queenship, childhood and women in Medieval England, and particularly on the role of women in 13th century political life. Her list of scholarly contributions includes works such as: Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World (2010), “The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern” (2009), and “Women as Sheris in Early Thirteenth Century England” (2004).
Professor Wilkinson earned her doctorate from Kings College London in 1999 under the tutelage of Professor David Carpenter, also of the Magna Carta Project, and Former President of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Dame Janet L. Nelson. She contributes to undergraduate modules on the Angevin kings and queens, and England in the age of Magna Carta.
Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law and Director of the Family Law and Policy Program and the Epstein Health Law and Policy Program at the University of Illinois College of Law. She is the author of eight books, including SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY (2008, with Douglas Laycock and Anthony Picarello, eds.), THE CONTESTED PLACE OF RELIGION IN FAMILY LAW (Robin Fretwell Wilson, ed.) (under contract with Cambridge University Press), and FAITH, SEXUALITY, AND THE MEANING OF FREEDOM (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Robin Fretwell Wilson, eds.) (in conversation with Cambridge University Press). Professor Wilson has worked extensively on state law reform. In 2007, she received the Citizen’s Legislative Award for her work on changing Virginia’s informed consent law. Most recently, she assisted the Utah Legislature to enact the Utah Compromise, balancing LGBT rights with religious liberty protections for traditional marriage. She directs the Fairness for All Initiative at UoI, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, which hopes to provide other proofs-of-principle in state law that gay rights and religious liberty need not be in tension. A member of the American Law Institute, her work has appeared in New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and Good Morning America, among others. Professor Wilson may be reached at wils@illinois.edu.
Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He is a contributor and reviewer for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Professor Wood is one of the most renowned US historians and scholars of our age. His work has received numerous awards, including: the Bancroft Prize, the De Lancey K. Jay Prize, the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book
Award, the John H. Dunning Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club. He has also won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize Award for History. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal.
Among Professor Wood’s numerous scholarly articles and books are: “The Problem of Sovereignty” (2011), Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2010), The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008), Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (2006), The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (2004), “Monarchism and Republicanism in the Early United States” (2000), “The Origins of Vested Rights in the Early Republic” (1999), The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), and The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).
Professor Wood received his bachelor’s degree from Tufts University, and earned his MA and PhD in History from Harvard University. While there, he studied under renowned historian and revolutionary-era political theorist, Bernard Bailyn. After his graduation, he taught at Harvard University before teaching at the University of Michigan, and finally joining the faculty at Brown in 1969.
Elizabeth is Constitutional Accountability Center’s President. From 2008-2016, she served as CAC's Chief Counsel. A graduate of Claremont McKenna College and Yale Law School, Wydra joined CAC from private practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in San Francisco, where she was an attorney working with former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan in the firm’s Supreme Court/appellate practice. Wydra’s legal practice focuses on Supreme Court litigation and high-stakes cases in the federal courts of appeals. She has represented CAC as well as clients including congressional leaders, preeminent constitutional scholars and historians, state and local legislators and government organizations, and groups such as Justice at Stake, League of Women Voters, and AARP. Wydra appears frequently in print and on air as a legal expert for outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX, BBC, and NPR.
Andrew Yang is the founder of Venture for America and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Yang received his BA in Economics from Brown University and his JD from Columbia Law School. After graduating, he began his career as a corporate attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell. He left the firm to pursue entrepreneurship, and later founded Venture for America. Yang's presidential campaign entitled “Humanity First” proposes a $1,000/month universal basic income to all U.S. citizens between the ages of 18 to 64. He is the author of “Smart People Should Build Things” and “The War on Normal People.”
Ernest Young is one of the nation's leading authorities on constitutional law as it relates to federalism, having written extensively on the Rehnquist Court’s federalist revival and the difficulties confronting courts as they seek to draw lines between national and state authority. Professor Young has written on constitutional interpretation and constitutional theory, while dabbling in maritime law and comparative constitutional law.
A native of Abilene, Texas, Professor Young joined the Duke Law faculty in 2008, after serving as the Charles Alan Wright Chair in federal courts at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, where he had taught since 1999. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals (1993-94) and to Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court (1995-96). He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2004-05) and Villanova University School of Law (1998-99), as well as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center (1997).
Young has been the principal author of amicus briefs on behalf of leading constitutional scholars in several recent Supreme Court cases, including Medellin v. Texas (concerning presidential power and the authority of the International Court of Justice over domestic courts) and Gonzales v. Raich (concerning federal power to regulate medical marijuana).
Michael Zuckert is Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor, and Department Chair of Political Science at University of Notre Dame. Professor Zuckert teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Political Philosophy and Theory, American Political Thought, American Constitutional Law, American Constitutional History, Constitutional Theory, and Philosophy of Law.
Professor Zuckert has published extensively on a variety of topics, including George Orwell, Plato, Shakespeare, and contemporary liberal theory. He is currently finishing a book called Completing the Constitution: The Post-Civil War Amendments. He also was senior scholar for Liberty! (1997), a six-hour public television series on the American Revolution, and served as senior advisor on the PBS series on Benjamin Franklin (2002) and Alexander Hamilton (2007). He is currently head of the new Tocqueville Center for the Study of Religion in American Public Life.
Professor Zuckert earned his BA from Cornell University and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1974.
