Panelist Bios

Hon. Benes Z. Aldana is President of the National Judicial College, the nation’s oldest, largest and most widely attended college for judges.  He has established a national reputation as a pioneer and force multiplier in the field of judicial education.

The College’s many accomplishments during his tenure include achieving record-shattering enrollment in 2020.  This was driven by special online programming created in response to the coronavirus pandemic and to concerns about racial injustice that intensified after the police killing of George Floyd.

The College launched a first-of-its kind Judicial Academy for lawyers who aspire to become judges along with new courses on artificial intelligence, animal law, and other emerging topics.  A Judicial Renaissance course, designed to be presented abroad annually, brings together judges from around the globe for wide-ranging study of the origins of law and justice.

In 2018, the College organized a national symposium in Washington, D.C., examining efforts to undermine the public’s faith in the courts and the news media. A second national symposium in the nation’s capital in early 2020 explored ways to identify and combat implicit bias in jury decisions.  Under a five-year strategic plan developed in his first year as president, fundraising has increased, as have collaborations with many other judicial organizations such as the National Center for State Courts and the American Association for Justice.

Prior to joining the College, President Aldana had a distinguished 22-year career in the U.S. Coast Guard that included serving as the first Asian Pacific (Filipino) American chief trial judge in U.S. military history.

Other postings included chief legal officer of the Eighth Coast Guard District in New Orleans. In that role, he oversaw the largest field legal office in the Coast Guard, providing legal support to more than 4,700 personnel at more than 80 operational units in 26 states.  Before his posting in New Orleans, Benes served as chief counsel of the Legal Engagements Division of the Defense Department’s U.S. Africa Command, which is based in Stuttgart, Germany.  He led the U.S. military’s efforts in advancing the rule of law by working with African partner nation militaries and organizations such as the International Institute of Humanitarian Law.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Benes was deployed as a legal adviser to the Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Task Force in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Task Force conducted criminal investigations of suspected terrorists detained by U.S. forces.  He also served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environmental Enforcement Section.

Other notable military assignments included: special assistant U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington; deputy chief, Office of Environmental Law, U.S. Coast Guard; and appellate and trial counsel.  He served as the commanding officer, personnel services and support unit, Seattle, and executive officer for Coast Guard Base Seattle.

Judge Aldana has held many leadership positions within the American Bar Association.  He currently serves as the Chair of the ABA’s Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and is the immediate past president of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Judicial Council.

He is a 1991 cum laude graduate of Seattle University where he earned a bachelor’s in political science.  While in college, he served as student body president and a congressional intern on Capitol Hill.  He received his Juris Doctor in 1994 from the University of Washington School of Law.

Jill C. Anderson is a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Before coming to UConn she taught for three years at Western New England School of Law, following her work as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at Western Massachusetts Legal Services, where she represented low-income disabled individuals challenging discriminatory housing policies and insurance practices.

Professor Anderson is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Lowenstein Public Interest Fellow and earned James Kent Scholar honors. She was studying theoretical linguistics in graduate programs at Stanford University and the University of Copenhagen before an abiding interest in social justice led her to law. Prior to attending Columbia, she spent four years developing diversity training and testing projects at a law firm that monitored consent decrees in the aftermath of civil rights litigation.

Professor Anderson is known for her scholarship on language and law. Her expertise in linguistics informs her articles on statutory interpretation, which have appeared in the Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review, and which reach substantive areas as diverse as disability discrimination, white collar crime, intellectual property, and genocide law.  She has presented her work at numerous scholarly events and regularly shares its practical payoff by speaking before judicial and practitioner conferences. Professor Anderson teaches in the areas of insurance, contracts, legal interpretation, and law and cognition.

Hon. Robert E.  Bacharach was appointed in February 2013 as a United States Circuit Judge for the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

He graduated with High Honors from the University of Oklahoma with a B.A. in History and the Tom Lottinville Award for the Best Essay submitted in the History Department. He obtained his Juris Doctorate from Washington University School of Law in St. Louis in 1985, where he graduated order of the coif and was awarded the Breckenridge Scholarship for the second highest grade average in his senior year of law school. In law school at Washington University, he also served as the Developments Editor of the Washington University Law Quarterly (now named the Washington University Law Review) and was awarded the Mary Collier Hitchcock Prize for writing for the best Note (student article) in the law review.

Upon graduation from law school, Judge Bacharach clerked from 1985 to 1987 for Judge William J. Holloway, Jr., who was then the Chief Judge of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. After completing this clerkship, Judge Bacharach practiced civil litigation at Crowe & Dunlevy in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma from 1987 to 1999. He then served as a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Western District of Oklahoma until 2013, when he was appointed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Bacharach authored the recently published book on legal writing, Legal Writing: A Judge’s Perspective on the Science and Rhetoric of the Written Word, published by ABA Press. He has also authored Section 1983 and the Availability of a Federal Forum: A Reappraisal of the Police Brutality Cases, 16 Memphis St. Univ. L. Rev. 353 (1986); Section 1983 and an Administrative Exhaustion Requirement, 40 Okla. L. Rev. 407 (1987); Motions in Limine in Oklahoma State and Federal Courts, 24 Okla. City Univ. L. Rev. 113 (1999); Dirks v. SEC’s Footnote Fourteen: Horizontal and Vertical Reach, 62 Wash. Univ. L.Q. 477 (1984); and Post-Trial Juror Interviews by the Press: The Fifth Circuit=s Approach, 62 Wash. Univ. L.Q. 783 (1985). In addition, he and Professor Lyn Entzeroth (now Dean of Tulsa University School of Law) coauthored Judicial Advocacy in Pro Se Litigation: A Return to Neutrality, 42 Ind. L. Rev. 19 (2009).

Judge Bacharach is the recipient of the national Federal Bar Association’s Earl W. Kintner Award, the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Award of Judicial Excellence, and the Washington University School of Law Distinguished Alumni Award.

Hon. Scott Bales served on the Arizona Supreme Court for fourteen years, including as Chief Justice from July 2014 until July 2019. After retiring from the Court, he was the Executive Director of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver through July 2020. He now consults on appellate matters and internal investigations and serves as a neutral arbitrator.

Justice Bales serves on the Council of the American Law Institute and the Board of Trustees for the National Conference of Bar Examiners. He previously chaired the Council of the ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar and the Appellate Judges Conference of the ABA’s Judicial Division.  Justice Bales has often taught courses at the law schools at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona.

Before his appointment to the Court, he practiced law in Arizona for nearly 20 years as a private and public lawyer. He was a partner in Phoenix firms that later became Osborn Maledon P.A. and Lewis Roca.  He also served as Arizona’s Solicitor General from 1999-2001, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Policy Development from 1998-1999, a Special Investigative Counsel for the Justice Department’s Inspector General from 1995-97, and as a federal prosecutor.

He clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Joseph T. Sneed III on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. After graduating from Michigan State University with degrees in history and economics, he received a master’s degree in economics and his law degree from Harvard.

Sharon R. Barner, Esq. is an international business leader and lawyer with more than 30 years of experience assisting public and privately held technology, automotive, and life sciences companies to protect their intellectual property and to grow their businesses worldwide. She has combined strategic knowledge and legal discipline with passion and recognized leadership, delivering successful results in complex, global business environments.

Currently, Sharon is VP, Chief Administrative Officer, Interim Chief Human Resources Officer and Corporate Secretary for Cummins Inc., (NYSE:CMI), a fortune 200 global powertrain and power solutions leader, with over $21B in revenues. As CAO, Sharon is responsible for eight global functions, including communications, marketing, government relations, compliance, facilities, security, corporate responsibility and Cummins’ global shared services organization.  She manages a budget of approximately $685M and more than 2000 employees.

In her previous role at Cummins as Vice-President, Chief Legal Officer (2012 – 2021), Sharon was responsible for global legal matters, including support of strategic corporate initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory, compliance and other risk management activities. She managed a team of internal and external legal resources across eight countries. Under her guidance the team delivered multiple acquisitions including a $1 billion acquisition in 2014 of 18 distributors, $1.2 billion Eaton-Cummins Joint Venture in 2016 and $250 million acquisition of publicly owned Canadian energy company in 2019. She also brings deep corporate governance experience through her work at Cummins and as a director on public and private boards including Howmet Aerospace (NYSE:HWM), Eskenazi Health Foundation, Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), Leadership Council of Legal Diversity (LCLD) and Foundation of Advancement of Diversity in IP Law (FADIPL)

Sharon served as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) where she was responsible for patent and trademark operations, managing a budget of over $2 billion and 10,000 employees. Her work included developing a new hiring plan for the PTO (hiring 2500 examiners in FY2011), rolling out a nationwide work force (opening offices in Detroit, Denver, San Francisco), devising a new Human Capital Plan for all PTO business units, and driving creation of the “2010-2015 USPTO Strategic Plan.” She was also responsible for articulating US domestic and foreign intellectual property policies and led over 14 foreign missions to meet with leaders in government, academia and industry to raise awareness about the impact of intellectual property on business and innovation.

Sharon also had a distinguished career in private practice at Foley & Lardner where, as member of Executive Management Committee, she helped develop growth strategies and lead day-to-day operations for the 1100 lawyer firm; served as Intellectual Property Department Chair, expanding department revenue by 10% over 3 years; and establishing the firm’s first Asian offices, in Tokyo, Japan (2007) and Shanghai, China (2008).

Sharon’s business and personal travels have taken her to over 30 countries and she has met with government heads and policy-makers across the globe. She is a frequent speaker on intellectual property strategies and the importance of intellectual property to business value.  She received her bachelor’s degrees in political science and psychology from Syracuse University and her law degree from the University of Michigan.

Hon. Barbara McConnell Barrett was U.S. Ambassador to Finland, Deputy Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, and Vice Chairman of the U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board.

As the 25th Secretary of the Air Force, Barbara stood-up the United States Space Force, the first new military service in 70 years. Heading the Department of the Air Force, Secretary Barrett directed a $205 billion annual budget committed to organizing, training, and equipping both the Air Force and Space Force with 697,000 active, Guard, Reserve, and civilian Airmen and Guardians.

As an intern at the Arizona Legislature, Barbara Barrett was inspired by the exemplary public service of then-Arizona State Senator Sandra Day O’Connor. Since then, Barbara has advised U.S. Presidents and cabinet members on diplomacy, commerce, human rights, and management practices.  Today, she advises current presidents and prime ministers of democracies around the world as a member of the Global Leadership Foundation.

Outside of public policy, Barbara provided strategic leadership as a partner in a large Phoenix law firm and corporate counsel at two Fortune 500 companies. She chaired the Board of The Aerospace Corporation for four terms and served on the governing boards of RAND, Mayo Clinic, Raytheon, Space Foundation, Hershey, and Piper Aircraft.  She chaired a community bank and was interim president of Thunderbird School of Global Management.  She was CEO of the American Management Association and taught leadership as a Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Barbara was president of the International Women’s Forum and member of the U.S.–Afghan Women’s Council, where she founded a program to train and mentor Afghan women entrepreneurs.  Today, Barbara is one of nine citizen members of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents and is vice chairman of Caltech (California Institute of Technology), which operates NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Barbara and her husband, Craig, own Triple Creek Guest Ranch, A Montana Hideaway, which in 2014 was ranked the #1 hotel in the world by both Travel + Leisure Magazine and Business Insider.

An instrument-rated pilot, Barbara trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, culminating in certification for travel to the International Space Station.

Karen M. Blum is a Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School where she has taught for over forty years in the areas of Federal Courts, Police Misconduct Litigation, and Civil Procedure.  She received her B.A. from Wells College, a J.D. from Suffolk University Law School, and an LL. M. from Harvard Law School.

Professor Blum has been a regular faculty participant in Section 1983 Civil Rights Programs and Institutes throughout the United States.  Since 1990, she has served as a faculty member for workshops sponsored by the Federal Judicial Center for Federal District Court and Federal Magistrate Judges.

Professor Blum has authored numerous articles in the Section 1983 area, including a piece entitled Qualified Immunity: Time to Change the Message, 93 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1887 (2018). She is co-author, along with Michael Avery, David Rudovsky, and Jennifer Laurin of the treatise Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation (Clark Boardman, 3d ed., rev. 2021).

Carla Boutin-Foster, M.D. is currently the Associate Dean for Diversity Education and Research at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate.  In that role she oversees an array of pipeline programs from middle school through undergraduate years that are designed to increase diversity in the physician workforce and in biomedical research.  She also develops medical education curricula on health equity and social determinants of health.  She chairs the Health Equity and Social Justice Work Group of the College of Medicine.

In addition to her administrative role at SUNY Downstate, Dr. Boutin-Foster teaches first year medical students, trains junior faculty in research methodology, conducts research addressing health disparities and social determinants, and sits on NIH study sections.  Prior to joining SUNY Downstate, she was the Principal investigator of the NIH funded Center of Excellence for  Disparities Research and Community Engagement and chaired the Health Disparities and Equity Promotion Study Section of the  NIH.   She also served as an associate professor of medicine, associate professor of healthcare policy and research, and as the associate dean for diversity and inclusion at Weill Cornell Medical College.

A 1994 graduate of SUNY Downstate’s College of Medicine, Dr. Boutin-Foster completed her residency in Internal Medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She earned a master’s degree from the Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Cornell University in Health Services Research and Clinical Epidemiology.

Dr. Boutin-Foster served as the director and principal investigator of the Comprehensive Center of Excellence in Disparities Research and Community Engagement, whose mission was to conduct innovative health disparities research, engage community partners, and increase the diversity in the biomedical research pipeline.

Fred H. Cate is Vice President for Research, Distinguished Professor, C. Ben Dutton Professor of Law, and Adjunct Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He served as the founding director of IU’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research and Information Assurance Education, from 2003 to 2014, where he is now a senior fellow. He is also a senior advisor to Red Barn Strategy.

Professor Cate chaired the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s study on Law Enforcement and Intelligence Access to Encrypted Content and the International Telecommunication Union’s High-Level Experts on Electronic Signatures and Certification Authorities. He was counsel to the Department of Defense Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee, and a member of the National Academies’ Forum on Cyber Resilience, the National Academies’ Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Subcommittee, the National Security Agency’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Panel, the OECD’s Informal Advisory Expert Group on Cybersecurity and Panel of Experts on Health Information Infrastructure, Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, Intel’s Privacy and Security External Advisory Board, the Federal Trade Commission’s Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security, and the board of directors of The Privacy Projects. He has testified before numerous congressional committees and speaks frequently before professional, industry, and government groups.

The author of more than 250 articles and books, he served as the privacy editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ Security & Privacy and as one of the founding editors of the Oxford University Press journal, International Data Privacy Law. Professor Cate attended Oxford University and received his J.D. and his A.B. with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University. A former Senator and President of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, he is a fellow of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Bar Foundation, and an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute.

Hon. Luz Elena D. Chapa serves on the Texas Fourth Court of Appeals, and upon her election, she was the youngest serving Hispanic justice in the State of Texas. Justice Chapa also currently serves on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force for Saint Mary’s Hall in San Antonio.

Justice Chapa was raised in El Paso, Texas and pursued her secondary education in San Antonio at St. Mary’s University, where she received both her Bachelor of Arts in English and her Juris Doctor.  Prior to becoming a judge, Justice Chapa practiced on both sides of the civil docket in counties across Texas, with a concentration in products liability litigation.

Justice Chapa is a Texas Bar Foundation Life Fellow, a San Antonio Bar Foundation Fellow, a 2014 Inductee to the San Antonio Women’s Hall of Fame, and is a member of numerous other organizations. In addition to her personal and professional responsibilities to her family and the Fourth Court, Justice Chapa devotes her time to mentoring students at Healy Murphy Center, and is currently serving on the boards of the American Bar Association’s Judicial Division, the Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI), and Clarity Child Guidance Center. She previously served on the boards of the St. Mary’s Law Alumni Association, St. Mary’s Hispanic Law Alumni Association, and The Children’s Ballet of San Antonio. She is a proud member of National Charity League-Alamo Chapter, IMPACT San Antonio and is an official advocate for 1in5Minds – a campaign launched by Clarity to bring more awareness to the community about children’s mental health needs and to lessen the stigma associated with mental illness.

Erwin Chemerinsky is Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Berkley School of Law.

Prior to assuming this position, from 2008-2017, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.  Before that, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and from 1983-2004 was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science.  From 1980-1983, he was an assistant professor at DePaul College of Law.

He is the author of fourteen books, including leading casebooks and treatises about constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction.  His most recent books are Presumed Guilty:  How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights (Norton 2021), and The Religion Clauses:  The Case for Separating Church and State (with Howard Gillman) (Oxford University Press 2020).

Dean Chemerinsky is the author of more than 200 law review articles.  He is a contributing writer for the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, and writes regular columns for the Sacramento Bee, the ABA Journal, and the Daily Journal, and frequent op-eds in newspapers across the country.  He frequently argues appellate cases, including in the United States Supreme Court.

In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  In 2017, National Jurist magazine again named Dean Chemerinsky as the most influential person in legal education in the United States.  In January 2021, he was named President-elect of the Association of American Law Schools.

Hon. J. Michelle Childs was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina in August 2010.  On December 23, 2021, President Biden nominated Judge Childs to United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and she was confirmed by the Senate on July 19, 2022.

Judge Childs holds a B.S. in Management from the University of South Florida Honors College, a J.D. from the University of South Carolina School of Law, a Masters in Personnel and Employment Relations from the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business, a Masters of Judicial Studies from Duke University School of Law, and an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Public Service from the University of South Carolina.

Prior to serving as a U.S. District Judge, Judge Childs served as a South Carolina At-Large Circuit Court Judge, which included responsibilities as the Chief Administrative Judge for General Sessions and the Business Court for the Fifth Judicial Circuit of Richland and Kershaw Counties.  Judge Childs also received gubernatorial appointments as a Workers’ Compensation Commissioner and the Deputy Director for the South Carolina Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation’s Division of Labor.

Formerly a partner with the law firm of Nexsen Pruet, LLP, in Columbia, South Carolina, Judge Childs practiced in the areas of employment and labor law and general litigation.  She is very active with various local, state, and national bar organizations, as well as community organizations. She is the President-elect of the Federal Judges Association, a former Chair of the American Bar Association’s Judicial Division, and a former Secretary of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section.  She also serves as a fellow with the American Bar Association’s Litigation Section and its Committee on the American Judicial System.

Judge Childs is also a member of the American Law Institute, having served as an Advisor to the Restatement (Third) of Employment Law.  Throughout her career as a practicing lawyer and judge, she has lectured and served frequently on panels regarding litigation and trial techniques, courtroom practices and procedures, e-discovery, expert witnesses, evidence, and various topics for new lawyers.

Gen. John S. Cooke is the Director of the Federal Judicial Center. Before his appointment in September 2018 as the Center’s eleventh director, he served as director of the Center’s Judicial Education Division from 1998-2004, director of the consolidated Education Division, 2004-2005, and as Deputy Director, 2005-2018.

From 1972 to 1998, John served in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, from which he retired as a brigadier general. His last assignment, 1995-1998, was as Chief Judge, U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals and Commander, U.S. Army Legal Services Agency. From 1993-1995 he was the Judge Advocate, U.S. Army, Europe. During his career, he served as a trial counsel, defense counsel, and military judge. He was also an instructor in criminal law and later Academic Director and Deputy Commandant at The Judge Advocate General’s School. Other assignments included Chair of the Working Group of the Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, Staff Judge Advocate, 25th Infantry Division, and Chief of the JAGC Personnel, Plans and Training Office.

He holds a B.A. from Carleton College, a J.D. from the University of Southern California, and an LL.M. from the University of Virginia.

Hon. Stephanie Domitrovich has for over thirty-two (32) years served as a general jurisdiction state trial judge for Pennsylvania.  In May of 2006, she also became the first graduate to earn a Ph.D. in Judicial Studies from the University of Nevada, Reno and The National Judicial College.

Judge Domitrovich currently serves as Program Chair for the National Conference of State Trial Judges (NCSTJ).  She also serves as Vice-Chair on Technology Committee of the ABA’s Judicial Division.  She is on the Editorial Board of The Judges’ Journal and serves as Special Issues Editor for numerous editions.

Judge Domitrovich is Treasurer for the Pennsylvania Bar Association (PBA) Civil Litigation Section Council and Treasurer and Board member for Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts (IOLTA) for Pennsylvania.  She currently serves on the Jury Service Committee of Pennsylvania’s Interbranch Commission for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness and is a Past President of the Northwest PA American Inn of Court for Erie and Crawford Counties (1999-2001), Past President of Pennsylvania State Trial Court Judges (2005-06), and Past Chair of NCSTJ of Judicial Division of ABA (2010-11).

Judge Domitrovich is a Fellow with American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), a Board member of Forensics Specialties Accreditation Board (FSAB)and past Chair of Jurisprudence Section of AAFS (2016-2018). She currently serves as a member of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC).  In 1996, she in a USAID to assist judges in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in developing their judicial systems.

John Fattahi is a civil rights attorney who litigates police and jail misconduct cases throughout California. In recent years, his practice has focused on defending the large civil rights jury verdicts in California, both in post-trial motions and on appeal before the Ninth Circuit and Supreme Court.  In 2006, John graduated from UCLA School of Law, where he served as senior editor of the Law Review and spent a semester as an extern for Judge Stephen Reinhardt at the Ninth Circuit. After clerking for Judge Virginia Phillips in the Central District of California, John worked as an associate at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, then at the Law Office of Dale Galipo, before opening his own office in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.

Some of John’s noteworthy cases include: Young v. County of Los Angeles, 655 F.3d 1156 (9th Cir. 2011) (right to be free from pepper spray and baton strike for passive resistance); Slater v. Deasey, 789 Fed. Appx. 17, 21 (9th Cir. 2019) (right to be free from asphyxiating force); Archibald v. County of San Bernardino, C.D. Cal. No. 5:16-CV-01128 (denial of post-trial motions challenging $15.5m verdict for fatal shooting); Valenzuela v. City of Anaheim, 6 F.4th 1098 (9th Cir. 2021) (affirming $13.2m verdict for chokehold death); French v. City of Los Angeles, C.D. Cal. No. 5:20-CV-00416 (denial of post-trial motions challenging $17m verdict for off-duty shooting at Costco).

Born in South Dakota and a native of Whittier, California, John resides in the South Bay with his wife and two children.

Keith R. Fisher is the first Distinguished Fellow at the National Judicial College.  An honors graduate of Princeton University and Georgetown University Law Center, and with many years of experience in large law firm private practice and as a full-time law professor, Keith is a nationally known expert in several areas, ranging from legal and judicial ethics to domestic and international financial services regulation.

Professor Fisher has served as a member of the A.B.A. Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as Chair of the Professional Responsibility Committee of the A.B.A. Business Law Section and is the Executive Editor for Legal Opinions and Professional Responsibility for Business Law Today and author of Bank Mergers and Holding Company Acquisitions (Little Brown 1993) and the Lexis-Nexis/Matthew Bender Banking Law Manual, updated semiannually.  His published scholarship has appeared in a wide variety of law reviews and anthologies, and several of his articles have won prizes or honoraria or been cited in judicial opinions.

Keith was the principal drafter of the A.B.A.’s amicus curiae briefs (at both the certiorari and merits stages) to the U.S. Supreme Court in Caperton v. Massey Coal Co. (dealing with the due process ramifications of a judge’s refusal to recuse).  He has assists the Conference of Chief Justices Professionalism Committee, which focuses on all aspects of bar admissions and regulation of the legal profession, including the regulation of foreign lawyers.

Keith has considerable experience in large law firm practice where, among other things, he worked on Supreme Court and other appellate matters with E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr. and (now Chief Justice) John Roberts.  Prior to joining NJC, he served as Principal Consultant and Senior Counsel for Domestic and International Court Initiatives at the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), where he served as counsel to the amicus committee of the Conference of Chief Justices, which regularly submitted briefs amicus curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate courts, including a brief in the Supreme Court support of Delaware’s judicial selection system in Carney v. Adams; in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (en banc) in a challenge to Dallas County’s cash bail system; in the Ninth Circuit on a First Amendment challenges to the Code of Judicial Conduct; and again in the Ninth Circuit supporting State court policies on making newly filed civil complaints available to the media.  He also served advisor to the CCJ Professionalism Committee on bar licensing and admission of foreign lawyers and as counsel to the National Task Force on Fines, Fees, and Bail Practices.

Keith’s work in Judicial Ethics includes innovative and tailored in-person and virtual ethics trainings for judges at all levels, both in the United States and around the world.   His speaking engagements include the International Conference on Court Excellence in Singapore, the Department of Justice’s Professional Responsibility Training Session for U.S. Immigration Judges, an American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce Symposium on Improving the Greek Court System, the Magistrature de Quebec’s Colloque soulignant les 40 ans du Conseil de la magistrature, the U.N.’s Global Judicial Integrity Network, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s conference on judicial ethics and social media, and the Judicial Education Institute of Trinidad and Tobago.  He has also done anti-corruption training for judges and prosecutors in Suriname and serves on the Board of Editors for UNESCO publications on judicial bioethics.

Keith also has a degree in music theory and composition from Princeton and studied as a child at the Juilliard School of Music in New York.  He occasionally comes out of retirement to perform piano recitals.  Keith had a leading role in the Franco-Swiss docudrama Cleveland vs. Wall Street, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 2010.  He enjoys racquet sports, is an avid chess and bridge player, and has a love of learning about foreign languages and cultures.  He speaks French, Italian, German, Spanish, Greek, and a smattering of Japanese.

Clare Garvie is a distinguished fellow with the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University Law Center. She has been the lead author on a number of the Center’s reports on face recognition, including: The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America in 2016; Garbage In, Garbage Out: Face Recognition on Flawed Data and America Under Watch: Face Surveillance in the United States in 2019, as well as a forthcoming report titled A Forensic Without the Science: Face Recognition in U.S. Criminal Investigations.

In 2019 she testified before the House Oversight Committee about police use of face recognition. Her commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and she serves as an expert resource to both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and state legislatures. She received her J.D. from Georgetown Law and her B.A. from Barnard College in political science, human rights, and psychology. You can follow Clare on Twitter at @clareangelyn.

Eric Goldman is Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University School of Law. His research and teaching focuses on Internet law, and he blogs on that topic at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog [http://blog.ericgoldman.org].  His article, Emojis and the Law, is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3133412

Tara Leigh Grove is the Vinson & Elkins Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. Professor Grove graduated summa cum laude from Duke University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as the Supreme Court Chair of the Harvard Law Review.  Professor Grove clerked for Judge Emilio Garza on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and then spent four years as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, Appellate Staff, where she argued fifteen cases in the courts of appeals.

Professor Grove’s research focuses on the federal judiciary, interpretive theory, and the constitutional separation of powers.  She has published with such prestigious law journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Vanderbilt Law Review.  Professor Grove has received awards for both her research and her teaching.

In 2021, Professor Grove served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, a bipartisan commission created by President Biden and charged with examining proposals for Supreme Court reform.  Professor Grove is a co-author of Low & Jeffries’ Federal Courts and the Law of Federal-State Relations, a leading federal courts casebook, and she has served as the Chair of the Federal Courts Section of the Association of American Law Schools.  Professor Grove has been a visiting professor at both Harvard Law School and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Deepak Gupta is the founding principal of Gupta Wessler PLLC and a Lecturer at Harvard Law School, where he is an instructor in the Harvard Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. He has filed over one hundred briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and has argued before the Court five times, including once as a Court-appointed amicus. He has also testified before the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. Before founding his firm in 2012, Deepak helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the first appellate lawyer hired at the new agency.

Deepak regularly appears in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2021, he prevailed in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District, in which the Court unanimously ruled that people injured by mass-market products can establish personal jurisdiction to sue where their injury occurred, bucking a trend of decisions stretching back four decades. The Pound Civil Justice Institute recognized Deepak’s work on the Ford case with its 2022 Appellate Advocacy Award, which “recognizes excellence in appellate advocacy in America.”  In 2019, in Smith v. Berryhill, Deepak argued at the Court’s invitation in support of a judgment left undefended by the Solicitor General. He is the first Asian-American to be appointed to argue by the Justices.

Hon. Eva M. Guzman  serves as a shareholder in Chamberlain Hrdlicka’s commercial litigation and appellate practices in both Houston and San Antonio.

Justice Guzman began her legal career in family and civil law, practicing in Houston for 10 years before then-Governor George W. Bush appointed her to the District Court bench in Harris County in 1999.  In 2001, then-Governor Rick Perry appointed her to the Texas 14th Court of Appeals.  In 2009, he elevated Justice Guzman to the Supreme Court of Texas, where she became the first Latina to serve on Texas’s highest civil court and the first to win statewide office in Texas.

Over the course of her judicial career, Justice Guzman ruled on thousands of civil and criminal appeals and authored more than 900 opinions.  She has also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center, teaching trial advocacy. For many years, she has been a speaker and presenter at state and national legal conferences and symposiums.  An elected member of the prestigious American Law Institute, Justice Guzman has collaborated with other legal professionals on various studies and projects and authored articles for a number of legal publications.

Justice Guzman graduated from the University of Houston with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. She received a law degree from the South Texas College of Law. She also holds an LL.M. in Judicial Studies from Duke University School of Law, where she took classes from United States Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito.

Hon. Andrew D. Hurwitz was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by President Obama in 2012.  Judge Hurwitz had previously served as a Justice and then Vice Chief Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by Governor Napolitano in 2003.

Judge Hurwitz received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University (A.B. 1968) and his law degree from Yale Law School (J.D. 1972), where he was Note and Comment Editor of the Yale Law Journal.  He served as a law clerk to Judge Jon O. Newman of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut in 1972; to Judge J. Joseph Smith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1972-73; and to Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973-74.

Before joining the Arizona Supreme Court, Judge Hurwitz was a partner in the Phoenix firm of Osborn Maledon, where his practice focused on appellate and constitutional litigation, administrative law, and civil litigation.  He has argued two cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, including Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002), which held the then-existing statutory scheme for imposition of the death penalty in Arizona unconstitutional.

Judge Hurwitz served as Chief of Staff to Governor Bruce Babbitt from 1980 to 1983, and Chief of Staff to Governor Rose Mofford in 1988. He was a member of the Arizona Board of Regents from 1988 through 1996, and served as President of the Board in 1992-93.

Hon. George C. (“Buck”) James, Jr. is a Justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.  He was born in Savannah, Georgia and grew up in Sumter, South Carolina, a/k/a the center of the universe.

Justice James graduated from The Citadel in 1982 and earned his Juris Doctor from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1985.  He spent 21 years in private practice in Sumter, where he specialized in personal injury litigation, primarily on the defense side, insurance fraud, and defending governmental entities in Tort Claims Act cases.  In 2006, he was elected to the circuit court bench and served for eleven years until he was elected to the Supreme Court of South Carolina in 2017. He was re-elected in 2020 to a ten-year term.

In addition to his membership in the South Carolina Bar Association and the Sumter County Bar Association, he is the chair of the Supreme Court of South Carolina Judicial Education Committee, co-chair of the General Sessions Docket Management Committee, and is a member of the Supreme Court Commission on Continuing Legal Education. Justice James is also a member of the ABA Judicial Division and a member of the Executive Committee of the ABA Appellate Judges Conference. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the ABA Appellate Judges Education Institute.

Justice James is married to the former Dena Owen and they have a daughter, Alston (a speech pathologist in Pawleys Island, S.C.), and a son, George (a lawyer in Columbia, S.C.).  In his spare time, Justice James enjoys heavy-duty yard work, playing golf, and, on occasion, doing absolutely nothing.

Randy J. Kozel is the Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Academic Affairs at Notre Dame Law School.  He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and later served as a law clerk for Hon. Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Hon. Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He practiced as a litigation attorney at an international law firm and as special counsel at a Fortune 100 company before joining the faculty of Notre Dame Law School in 2011.

Professor Kozel is the Director of the Notre Dame Program on Constitutional Structure. His research focuses largely on constitutional law and theory, federal courts, and judicial process, with a particular focus on the role of precedent in legal decision making. His extensive scholarship exploring the connection between precedent and interpretive philosophy has been published in distinguished law journals including the Northwestern University Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Vanderbilt Law Review, among others. His book Settled Versus Right: A Theory of Precedent (2017), makes the case for using precedent to bridge interpretive disagreements.  In 2014, Professor Kozel was recognized as the Distinguished Teacher of the Year.

Mark A. Kressel is a partner at Horvitz & Levy, an appellate boutique in Los Angeles.  Mark helps clients by first understanding their business needs and goals and how litigation can play a part in solving their problems, whether by winning on appeal, developing a multi-forum litigation or settlement strategy, or identifying vehicles to change the legal landscape. Major studios and government entities rely on Mark Kressel for his extensive multi-forum strategy and appellate advocacy capabilities. He has handled appellate matters in a wide range of areas, including the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the anti-SLAPP statute, the First Amendment, punitive damages, elder abuse, wrongful death and catastrophic injury, general business litigation, premises liability, and patent infringement litigation.

Mark joined the firm as an associate and was invited to join the partnership in 2018. Before joining the firm, Mark was a litigation associate with Irell & Manella LLP. In addition to his bar admissions, he has practiced before the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Mark is currently the Chair of the ABA Council of Appellate Lawyers, a bench-bar organization that, among other things, assists with planning the AJEI Summit.  He is also the co-director of the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law’s Ninth Circuit Appellate Advocacy Clinic, and is active in diversity and inclusion organizations including the LGBTQ+ Bar Association of Los Angeles and the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity.

Prior to law school, Mark worked as a Broadway musician.

Mark Lanterman is the Chief Technology Officer of Computer Forensic Services. Before entering the private sector, Mark was a member of the U. S. Secret Service Electronic Crimes Taskforce. Mark has 28 years of security and forensic experience and has testified in over 2000 cases.

Mark is faculty for the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C., the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada, the University of Minnesota and the Mitchell Hamline Law School. Mark is also a professor in the cybersecurity program at the St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mark has provided training in digital evidence, computer forensics and cyber security to the United States Supreme Court.  He has also presented to the 8th and 11th Circuit Federal Judicial Conferences as well as numerous State Judicial

Conferences across the United States.

Mark completed his postgrad studies in cybersecurity at Harvard University and is certified as a Seized Computer Evidence Recovery Specialist (SCERS) by the Department of Homeland Security.

Mark is a member of the Minnesota Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board and serves as Chairman of its Opinion Committee.

Hon. Thomas R. Lee is a Principal in Corpus Juris Advisors (a consulting firm) and Lee Nielsen (a law firm) and a Lecturer at law schools at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. He is a former Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.

Justice Lee has been an innovator at the intersection of law and linguistics. His judicial opinions and scholarship advocate the use of theories and tools used by linguists in interpreting the language of law. Through the methodology of “corpus linguistics,” Lee has sought to bring rigor and precision to the law’s search for the “ordinary meaning” of the words of statutes and provisions of the Constitution.  Examples of recent publications include Judging Ordinary Meaning, 127 Yale L. J. 788 (2018) (co-authored with Stephen Mouritsen); Data-Driven Originalism, 167 Penn. L. Rev. 261 (2019) (co-authored with James Phillips); and The Corpus and the Critics, 88 U. Chi. L. Rev. 275 (2021) (co-authored with Stephen Mouritsen).

Through his consulting and law practices, Lee seeks to cement the practical applications of his academic and judicial work.  His consulting firm provides expert guidance on the use of corpus linguistic tools in a broad range of cases—both public law (statutes and constitutional provisions) and private law (contracts, trademarks, and patents).  His law firm is an appellate boutique with sub-specialties in interpretation and intellectual property.

Stacy L. Leeds serves as Foundation Professor of Law and Leadership at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.  She is a scholar of Indigenous law and policy and an experienced leader in law, higher education, economic development and conflict resolution.

The first Indigenous woman to lead a law school, Leeds served as law dean (2011-2018) and then inaugural Vice Chancellor for Economic Development (2017-2020) at University of Arkansas.  She previously served as a professor and administrator at University of Kansas and University of North Dakota, and as a William H. Hastie Fellow at University of Wisconsin. Leeds is well-known for extensive national and local public service.

Leeds is a former Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice and was recently appointed by United States Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland to serve as a founding board member on the Foundation for America’s Public Lands, a congressionally-chartered non-profit. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an American Bar Foundation Fellow and a recipient of the American Bar Association’s Spirit of Excellence Award.

Professor Leeds holds law degrees from University of Wisconsin (LL.M.) and University of Tulsa (J.D.), a business degree from University of Tennessee (M.B.A)., and an undergraduate degree in history from Washington University in St. Louis (B.A.).  A former athlete and life-long sports enthusiast, Leeds was inducted into the Muskogee Athletic Hall of Fame in her hometown in Oklahoma. She played varsity basketball and tennis at Wash U. In 2016, she completed a 950-mile journey as a Cherokee Nation Remember the Removal cyclist.

She splits her time between Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation and downtown Phoenix, Arizona. She is a co-host of ThinkTsalagi (a community of Cherokee scholars) and the host of IndigenousWell – a blog about health, wellness (and sometimes, politics).

Hon. J. Matthew Martin is an Administrative Law Judge with the Social Security Administration.  He also serves as the first American Bar Association (ABA) Tribal Courts Fellow.  In 2013 he retired after over a decade of service as an Associate Judge of the Cherokee Court, the Tribal Court for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Judge Martin received a BA with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a JD from the UNC School of Law. He also holds a Ph.D. in Judicial Studies from the University of Nevada-Reno (UNR).  For 30 years, Judge Martin has been Board Certified as a Specialist in Federal and State Criminal Law by the North Carolina State Bar.  In the 1991 Term, at age 31, he argued Wade v. United States before the Supreme Court of the United States.

A member of the faculty of the National Judicial College, Judge Martin has also served as an adjunct member of the faculty at the UNC and Elon University Schools of Law.  He is currently a Visiting Professor of Judicial Studies at UNR. Judge Martin has spoken nationally and internationally on issues ranging from federal Indian law to criminal law and the judicial process. He is published in multiple peer reviewed journals and in 2016, his chapter, “Tribal Courts at a Crossroads,” was included in the 8th Edition of the ABA’s The Improvement of the Administration of Justice. His first book, The Cherokee Supreme Court: 1823-1835, was published in 2021 by Carolina Academic Press.

In 2014 Judge Martin received the Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award from the ABA’s Criminal Justice Section and the Franklin N. Flaschner Award, as the nation’s outstanding specialized court judge, from the ABA’s National Conference of Specialized Judges.  In 2021, he received a Public Service Award from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Judge Martin and his wife, Catherine, live in Asheville, NC with two rescue dogs, one of whom is a real rascal.

Hon. Christopher J. McFadden is the Presiding Judge of the Georgia Court of Appeals, to which he was originally elected in November 2010 for a term beginning January 1, 2011 and reelected in 2016.  He is a son of the late Isabel McFadden and the late Judge Donald B. McFadden, who served for twenty years as a trial court judge in Akron, Ohio.

Judge McFadden graduated from Oglethorpe University in 1980 and from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1985. He opened his own law office in 1988 and remained a sole practitioner focusing on appellate litigation until he joined the Court of Appeals.  He is the co-author, along with the late Professor Edward C. Brewer and attorney Charles R. Sheppard, of the treatise Georgia Appellate Practice, updated annually.

Judge McFadden is a member of The American Law Institute.  With attorney Laurie Webb Daniel, Judge McFadden is a founding past Chair of the Appellate Practice Section of the State Bar of Georgia. He served or twelve years as an officer or director of the Atlanta Bar Association, is a past chair of its Sole Practitioner/Small Firm and Judicial Sections, and is a recipient of the its Distinguished Service and Charles E. Watkins, Jr. Awards.  He has also served as a volunteer attorney for the Innocence Project and the Election Protection Project.  In addition to the Atlanta Bar Association, he is a member of the DeKalb Bar Association, Lawyers Club of Atlanta, Gate City Bar Association, the Federalist Society, the American Constitution Society, the Saint Thomas More Society and Oglethorpe University’s Stormy Petrel Bar Association.

Judge McFadden served for more than six years on the State Bar of Georgia’s Committee on the Judiciary.  He presently serves as Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Appellate Judges Conference of the American Bar Association and chaired its 2018 Appellate Judges Education Institute, which was held in Atlanta.  He chaired a committee of the Judicial Council of Georgia that drafted the Superior and State Court Appellate Practice Act.

Judge McFadden is a parishioner at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Decatur, Georgia and has served as a lector since 1988.  He is married to Dr. Linda Hyde, Professor of Biology at Gordon State College in Barnesville, Georgia.  They have a son.

Hon. Ruth V. McGregor served on the Arizona Supreme Court from February 1998 until June 30, 2009.  She served as Chief Justice from June 2005 until her retirement. She was also a member of the Arizona Court of Appeals from 1989 until 1998, where she served as Chief Judge from 1995 to 1997.

Before her appointment to the bench, Justice McGregor engaged in the private practice of law as a member of the Fennemore Craig law firm in Phoenix, Arizona. She served as law clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor during Justice O’Connor’s first term on the United States Supreme Court.

Justice McGregor received a Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Iowa. She received her Doctor of Jurisprudence degree, summa cum laude, from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and a Master of Laws in the Judicial Process from the University of Virginia. Justice McGregor has participated extensively in professional activities, particularly in those organizations dedicated to assuring a fair and impartial judiciary. Among other activities, she has served as an officer and a member of the Board of Trustees for the American Inns of Court Foundation, the National Association of Women Judges, and Justice at Stake; as a board member of the Conference of Chief Justices and the American Judicature Society; and as a member of the Legal Council of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, including a term as Chair.

Justice McGregor currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for the Future of Arizona and of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.  Since her retirement, in addition to chairing several commissions for the Arizona Supreme Court, she has completed a number of investigations for public entities and acted as a special master for the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, as mediator for the City of Phoenix in public transit disputes, and as special administrator for the Arizona Supreme Court.

Justice McGregor has received several state and national awards for her work in the judicial system, including the Dwight D. Opperman Award from the American Judicature Society, the A. Sherman Christensen Award from the American Inns of Court Foundation, the James A. Walsh Award from the Arizona State Bar, the Marilyn R. Seymann Award from the Arizona Foundation for Women, the Sarah Herring Sorin Award from the Arizona Women Lawyers Association, and outstanding alumna awards from Arizona State University and the University of Iowa.

Hon. Laurie McKinnon was elected in November 2012 to the Montana Supreme Court as Associate Justice. In 2020, she was reelected to a second eight year term on the Court.

Prior to her election to the Montana Supreme Court, Justice McKinnon was a general jurisdiction trial judge in northern Montana for six years in a judicial district which included four counties. In 2010, Justice McKinnon was awarded Judge of the Year by the Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Montana for her work in cases involving abused and neglected children. In 2011, she wrote and received a $350,000 federal grant from the Department of Justice for implementation of a drug treatment court within her jurisdiction.

Justice McKinnon served on the District Court Performance Measurement Advisory Committee to the Montana Supreme Court, the Judicial Education Committee, and the Justice Initiatives Committee. She currently is a board member of the ABA Executive Committee of the Appellate Judges Conference and the Executive Committee of the Appellate Judges Education Institute. In 2016, she received her master’s degree in Judicial Studies from the University of Nevada, Reno. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Judicial Studies. She frequently teaches judicial education courses to judges in Montana and to lawyers of the Montana State Bar.

Justice McKinnon is a graduate of the University of Baltimore School of Law and began practicing law in 1987. Her experience prior to becoming a judge includes ten years as a prosecutor in Montana and the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office in Maryland. Justice McKinnon has also been a criminal defense attorney at both the trial and appellate levels.

Katherine McKnight is a Partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Baker Hostetler. She is a seasoned trial and appellate advocate handling politically contentious matters in state and federal courts across the country, as well as handling commercial litigation, tax controversies, and white collar criminal defense matters.  Ms. McKnight has developed a recognized expertise in counseling and litigating on behalf of legislatures and local governments in matters of legislative redistricting, alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act, and alleged equal protection and free speech violations in election law matters.  She has defended state and congressional redistricting plans in Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina (including arguing before the North Carolina Supreme Court in Common Cause v. Lewis, a successor to Rucho v. Common Cause) and has defended against alleged Voting Rights Act violations in Virginia.

Ms. McKnight is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Minnesota Law School. She served as a law clerk to Hon. Claude M. Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia and formerly worked for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a nonprofit agency that works to strengthen and safeguard democratic institutions and processes around the world.

Brian Miller is a partner at Royston Rayzor Vickery & Williams L.L.P. in Corpus Christi, Texas.  His practice focuses on civil appellate litigation.  Brian’s experience spans a wide variety of civil litigation, including suits involving commercial and employment disputes, industrial and oilfield accidents, civil rights, administrative law, and maritime law.

In addition to his appellate work, Brian has also served as trial counsel in several cases. In 2021, he concluded a one-year term as Chair of the ABA’s Council of Appellate Lawyers.  Since Fall 2018, he has served on the Education Committee for the AJEI Summit.

From 2013 to 2014, Brian was chair of the Appellate Advocacy Committee of the ABA’s Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section. He was a member of the executive board of the University of Texas Law School Alumni Association from 2016 to 2020, and he served on the State Bar of Texas board of directors from 2014 to 2017. He serves on the State Bar’s Pattern Jury Charges Oversight Committee, which coordinates, considers, and approves standard jury instructions that six subject-matter committees propose for use in trials in Texas courts.

Hon. Robert J. Miller is a professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University where he is also the Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar and the Director of the Rosette LLP American Indian Economic Development Program. He is the Chief Justice for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe Court of Appeals and an appellate judge for other tribal courts.

Professor Miller graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School in 1991 and then clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1991-92.  He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014, the oldest learned society in the United States.

Bob has written dozens of articles on Indian Law issues and has authored and co-authored five books. His fifth book entitled A Promise Kept: The Muscogee (Creek) Nation and McGirt v. Oklahoma will be released in early 2023. Bob is a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe.

Hon. Jan W. Morris is the Director of the National Tribal Judicial Center at the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada.  He has worked exclusively in tribal courts during his 30+ year legal career, including as litigator, court administrator, and for over 20 years a judge on various trial and appellate benches.

Prior to joining the NTJC as Director, Judge Morris served for 15 years as faculty for tribal judicial bench skills and court management courses at the NTJC and received the designation of NJC Distinguished Faculty in 2020. While retired from full-time duties on the bench, Judge Morris continues to serve as an Alternate District Court Judge for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Court and as an Appellate Justice for the Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Court of Appeals. He is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Karl S. Myers is a leading Pennsylvania appellate lawyer and Co-Chair of Stevens & Lee’s Appellate Practice Group in Philadelphia. He focuses on cases before the Pennsylvania Supreme, Commonwealth and Superior Courts, as well as the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Karl has frequently presented televised arguments on the Pennsylvania Cable Network and his arguments are often quoted in the Pennsylvania Law Weekly, The Legal Intelligencer, Law360 and other regional and national publications. As a thought leader in his area of law, he comments on notable issues before the appellate courts and often serves as a panelist and moderator for appellate practice presentations and seminars.

Karl also serves as Co-Chair of the Appellate Advocacy Committee of the Pennsylvania Bar Association and as a member of the Board of Directors and as Pennsylvania State Chair for the Council of Appellate Lawyers of the American Bar Association’s Appellate Judges Conference. He is also a member of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Historical Society.

Karl clerked for Hon. Russell M. Nigro of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and interned during law school for Hon. John T.J. Kelly Jr. of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania.

Hon. Jacqueline H. Nguyen was nominated by President Obama to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and confirmed in 2012.   Judge Nguyen was the first Asian American woman appointed to a federal court of appeals. Prior to her confirmation to the Ninth Circuit, Judge Nguyen served as a district judge on the United States District Court for the Central District of California.  She began her judicial career as a trial judge on the Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles, California, serving from 2002 to 2009.

Prior to taking the bench, Judge Nguyen spent seven years as a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, where she also served as a Deputy Chief in charge of training new Assistant United States Attorneys. Judge Nguyen began her legal career in private practice at the Los Angeles law firm of Musick, Peeler & Garrett.

Judge Nguyen received her A.B. from Occidental College in 1987. She earned her J.D. from UCLA Law School in 1991.

Judge Nguyen has been active in the legal community for many years and has been widely recognized for her public service. As a lawyer, she served on the board of various bar associations including the Women Lawyers’ Association of Los Angeles County, the Southern California Chinese Lawyers’ Association, and the Japanese American Bar Association. She also co-founded and served as President of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association from 1999 to 2000. As a judge, she has continued her commitment to the legal community. In addition to her current service in the Judicial Division of the American Bar Association, she is active on a number of court committees and local associations.  She is the current chair of the Appellate Judges Conference.

Hon. Colleen O’Toole is currently the elected County prosecutor in Ashtabula, Ohio, where she is dedicated to reformatting the process to deliver more effective, efficient, and accountable access to justice commensurate with best practice.  Previously, she served as a judge of the Ohio Court of Appeal and a  Judiciary member /Legal consultant, Major Commercial court in the Expert Chamber Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where she also lectures frequently.

Judge O’Toole assisted the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department (ADJD) in developing and pioneering international best practices throughout their legal system.   She consulted with the top leadership of ADJD to modernize and improve its procedures and practices commensurate with modern international best practices.  She also served on the World Bank Doing Business Committee during her tenure in Abu Dhabi to increase the UAE’s global standing on economically efficient systems favorable to international commerce.

She is the founder of ODIS, LLC., an award-winning technology startup company that provides legal interpretation services for courts, in 170 languages, including ASL, on personal and mobile devices.

O’Toole is an active member of the American Bar Association, serving on several committees, speaking and presenting both for the AJC and internationally for the Abu Dhabi Judicial academy, and is an Ohio State Bar Foundation Fellow.  Just recently, she received her LL.M. from Duke Law school.  She is a past member of the Executive Board of the Lake County, Ohio NAACP.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne.

Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration.  He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is co-author of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2022), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes, and Franita Tolson.  His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.

Professor Persily is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne.

Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration.  He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is co-author of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2022), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes, and Franita Tolson.  His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.

Professor Persily is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

Hon. Esther Salas is a United States District Judge for the District of New Jersey.  She earned her B.A. from Rutgers University and her J.D. from Rutgers School of Law-Newark.  After graduating from law school, Judge Salas clerked for the Honorable Eugene J. Codey, Judge of the Superior Court, Essex County Vicinage.

In October 1995, Judge Salas entered private practice with the law firm of Garces and Grabler, P.C., where she focused on criminal defense and appellate litigation. In September 1997, Judge Salas joined the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of New Jersey. As an Assistant Federal Public Defender, Judge Salas represented indigent criminal clients in front of both the New Jersey District Court and the Third Circuit.

On November 3, 2006, Judge Salas was sworn in as a Magistrate Judge for the District of New Jersey—the first Latinx attorney to hold that position. On June 14, 2011, the Senate unanimously confirmed President Obama’s nomination of Judge Salas as a United States District Judge. Judge Salas was sworn in by Hon. Jose L. Linares, making her the first Latina District Judge in the District of New Jersey. As a District Judge, Judge Salas has presided over complex civil and criminal cases, including a number of issues of first impression for the District of New Jersey. Additionally, Judge Salas, along with Senior District Judge Katharine S. Hayden, co-founded the District of New Jersey Pretrial Opportunity Program, which provides pre-trial judicial intervention for criminal defendants suffering from drug and alcohol addiction.

Judge Salas has been recognized for her work on and off the bench. She has received numerous awards, including the Whipple Memorial Award from the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey (2008), the Women’s Initiative and Leaders in Law Platinum Award from the New Jersey Women Lawyer’s Association (2015), and Woman of Substance Award from Seton Hall University’s Women’s Law Forum (2015).

Judge Salas is a loving wife to her husband of 26 years, Mark Anderl, and the proud mother of her late son, Daniel Mark Anderl, who offered his life as an act of love when a disgruntled lawyer targeted Judge Salas because of her position as a federal judge. Since Daniel’s senseless and tragic murder, Judge Salas has made it her mission to ensure greater protections for judges. Daniel’s sacrifice, and Judge Salas’s advocacy, led to the swift passage of “Daniel’s Law” in New Jersey. To ensure that Daniel’s death will not be in vain, Judge Salas continues to advocate for federal legislation to ensure greater protections for federal judges.

Michael A. Scodro is a partner in the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice at Mayer Brown LLP in Chicago. An experienced appellate lawyer, Michael previously served as the Illinois Solicitor General and has argued dozens of cases in federal and state supreme and appellate courts, including three in the U.S. Supreme Court. He is chair of the Illinois Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Responsibility, past president of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association, and past chair of the ABA’s Council of Appellate Lawyers.

Michael also teaches courses on the U.S. Supreme Court and on the role and practice of state attorneys general as a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. After graduating from Yale Law School, he served as a law clerk to Hon. José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Hon. Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lisa Soronen is the Executive Director of the State and Local Legal Center (SLLC). In this role, Lisa files amicus curiae briefs to the United States Supreme Court on behalf of members of the Big Seven (National Governors Association, National Conference of State Legislatures, Council of State Governments, National League of Cities, United States Conference of Mayors, National Association of Counties, and International City/County Management Association) in cases affecting state and local government.

Prior to joining the SLLC, Lisa worked for the National School Boards Association, the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, and clerked for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. She earned her J.D. at the University of Wisconsin Law School and is a graduate of Central Michigan University.

Gretchen Sperry is the Chair of Hinshaw’s Appellate Practice Group, which is ranked Tier 1 nationally by U.S. News – Best Law Firms. She has represented clients in numerous state and federal courts of review, including the United States Supreme Court. As a former appellate court clerk, Ms. Sperry applies her experience and understanding of the judicial process at all stages of litigation, from drafting critical motions and appeals to developing long-term legal strategies in complex commercial litigation, constitutional litigation, labor and employment matters, and high-exposure catastrophic injury cases.

Ms. Sperry is highly skilled at handling the sensitive and unique legal issues that arise at the intersection of law, politics, and government. She is experienced in white collar criminal matters, having represented individuals and entities in federal criminal prosecutions and investigations, as well as conducting internal investigations in anticipation of government involvement. Ms. Sperry frequently represents government agencies and elected officials in constitutional litigation as a court-appointed Special Assistant State’s Attorney. She also represents private sector clients before various governmental, legislative, and regulatory agencies, counseling them on pending legislation and regulatory compliance matters.

Prior to joining Hinshaw, Ms. Sperry was a Judicial Clerk to Hon. Mary Jane Theis and Hon. Maureen E. Connors in the Illinois Appellate Court. In law school, she also served as a judicial extern to Hon. Michael T. Mason, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and was a Senior Research Fellow for Dean Michael J. Kaufman.

Ms. Sperry is an active member of the legal community. She was appointed by the Illinois Supreme Court to serve as a member of the Character and Fitness Committee of the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar. She has served as an adjunct faculty member at two Chicago law schools teaching Appellate Advocacy. She also serves as the Immediate Past President of the Illinois Appellate Lawyers Association and is actively involved in the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois.

Jason Steed is an appellate attorney in the Dallas office of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP. He has represented clients before the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court of Texas, the Supreme Court of California, the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, and the Supreme Court of Alaska—and before numerous state and federal intermediate appellate courts across the country.

Hon. Melody Stewart was elected in November 2018 to a full term as the 161st Justice, and the first African-American female, to serve on the Supreme Court of Ohio. Prior to joining the Supreme Court, Justice Stewart served on the Eighth District Court of Appeals and also served as that court’s Administrative Judge in 2013.

Justice Stewart has more than 30 years of combined administrative, legal, and academic experience. She was an administrator for a health care management company, a music teacher, a civil defense litigator, and a law school administrator and professor before being elected to the Court of Appeals.

Justice Stewart earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati; her law degree as a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow from Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University; and her Ph.D. as a Mandel Leadership Fellow at Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. She was also awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Cleveland State University.

After practicing law as an assistant law director for the cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland, Justice Stewart worked as a lecturer, an adjunct instructor, and an assistant dean at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law before joining the full-time faculty. Additionally, she taught at the University of Toledo College of Law and at Ursuline College.  She also served as director of student services at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law.

Justice Stewart has served on many boards and committees, including the Ohio Criminal Justice Recodification Committee, the Ohio Supreme Court’s Judicial College board. She was chair of the Ohio Capital Case Attorney Fee Council, and served as a commissioner and chair of the Board of Planning and Zoning for the city of Euclid.  She has been a member of various professional, educational, civic, and community organizations.

Justice Stewart is admitted to practice in the state and federal courts in Ohio, the District of Columbia, and the United States Supreme Court.

Hon. David Thomson was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He completed an undergraduate degree in Economics and Government from Wesleyan University and graduated from the University of Denver Sturm College Of Law.

Justice Thomson began his career as a term law clerk for the U.S. District Judge Bruce Black, District of New Mexico.  After his clerkship, he joined the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office as a litigation attorney, eventually serving as a Deputy Attorney General.

Justice Thomson was sworn in on February 1, 2019 as a Justice on the New Mexico Supreme Court.  Previously, he had served as a State Trial Court Judge in the First Judicial District where he managed complex civil litigation.  In addition to authoring opinions, Justice Thomson is a leader in efforts to increase diversity in judicial clerkships and the education of the judiciary and the Bar.  In 2019, he founded a diversity clerkship program with the state bar association.

David Andrew Timchak is an attorney with the American West firm, Fennemore Craig, P.C., where he concentrates his practice on appeals and issue-oriented litigation. Mr. Timchak has substantial experience in all aspects of appellate practice and often serves as a strategic advisor during trial.  Mr. Timchak has handled litigation in federal and state courts of all levels on matters involving novel procedural and substantive issues, representing both plaintiffs and defendants in relation to constitutional claims, statutory and administrative law interpretation, as well as business, tort, contract, and real property disputes.  He has been selected to the Southwest Rising Stars® List for Appellate practice from 2019–2022.

Mr. Timchak is committed to charity and pro bono work. He serves as the Co-Chair of the American Bar Association Council of Appellate Lawyers Pro Bono Committee and is an active member of the Arizona Court of Appeals Pro Bono Representation Program and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Pro Bono Representation Program.  In addition, Mr. Timchak is the Chair Elect of the State Bar of Arizona Appellate Practice Executive Council and is a member of the American Bar Association Council of Appellate Lawyers Executive Board.

Hon. Ann A. Scott Timmer joined the Arizona Supreme Court in 2012.  She was elected by her colleagues as Vice Chief Justice in 2019.  Before that, she was a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals from 2000 to 2012 and served three of those years as Chief Judge.

Notably, while a member of the Supreme Court, Justice Timmer chaired the Court’s Legal Services Task Force, which recommended rules (ultimately adopted) that created a new tier of legal service providers and eliminated Arizona’s ethics rule prohibiting fee sharing between lawyers and nonlawyers.  She currently chairs the Court’s Attorney Regulation Advisory Committee, is a member of the National Conference of Bar Examiners Board of Trustees, the Board of Trustees of the Appellate Judges Education Institute, and has been elected to The American Law Institute.  She has received many honors, including most recently being named one of a New Decade of Arizona’s Most Intriguing Women (2022), an ABA Journal and ABA Center for Innovation Legal Rebel (2021), and the Arizona Capitol Times Woman of the Year (2020).

Justice Timmer earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, her J. D. magna cum laude, from Arizona State University Law School (now the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law), and a Masters in Judicial Studies from Duke University Law School. As an attorney, she primarily practiced commercial litigation with Phoenix-based law firms before joining the bench.

Kevin Tobia is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.  He researches and teaches in legal interpretation, legal theory, and torts. Professor Tobia received a B.A. in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science from Rutgers University; a B.Phil. (Philosophy M.A.) with distinction from Oxford; and a J.D. and Ph.D. from Yale.  Professor Tobia’s scholarship has been awarded the Yale Law School Felix S. Cohen prize for legal philosophy and the AALS Section on Jurisprudence “Future Promise Award” for scholarship in legal philosophy.  His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review.

Hon. Robert J. Torres, Jr. was born and raised on Guam and was sworn in as Justice of the Supreme Court of Guam in 2004.  He served his first term as Chief Justice of Guam from January 15, 2008 to January 18, 2011 and his second term from January 21, 2014 to January 17, 2017.

Justice Torres played a central role in expanding court services on Guam with the opening of the Northern Court Satellite, enabling wireless technology and videoconferencing in the courtrooms, and implementing e-filing and increased online services.  A self-professed technophile, he laid the groundwork for the design and acquisition of a modern case management system and continues to oversee various technological advancements for the Judiciary of Guam.

Justice Torres is on the American Judges Association’s Executive Committee and Board of Governors and since 2016 has been on the Social Media and Technology Committee for the American Judges Association.  He has spoken at numerous conferences on “Judicial Ethics and Social Media,” and has lectured in over twenty countries on a variety of subjects including the International Framework for Court Excellence, case flow management, cultural responsiveness, court community communication, alternative dispute resolution, technology, and judicial ethics and discipline.  He presently serves as the Membership Secretary for NAPABA’s Judicial Council and chairs numerous Judiciary of Guam subcommittees.

Justice Torres received his B.B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He was also awarded two Doctor of Laws (LL.D.), Honoris Causa, from the University of Cebu and Centro Escolar University in the Philippines.

He is married to the Honorable Senator Mary Camacho Torres. They have three children and 11 grandchildren

Steve Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law. He previously taught at the University of Miami School of Law and American University’s Washington College of Law.

A nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, Vladeck has argued three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and has a book on the Court’s “shadow docket” that will be published by Basic Books next May. He has also testified before numerous congressional committees and government agencies. And he is the Supreme Court Fellow at the Project on Government Oversight’s Constitution Project.

Professor Vladeck is the co-host of the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.”  He is a contributor to CNN and co-author of a leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. He is an executive editor of the Just Security blog and a senior editor of the Lawfare blog.  Currently he writing a book about the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” which is scheduled for publication in 2023.

A graduate of Amherst College and Yale Law School, Professor Vladeck clerked for Hon. Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Hon. Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Hon. Elizabeth D. (“Beth”) Walker has served on the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia since 2017 and was the first justice elected in a non-partisan race. She is the longest-serving member of the Court and has been elected to serve as Chief Justice during calendar year 2023, having previously served in that role in 2019.

Justice Walker is an advocate for well-being in the legal profession and chairs the West Virginia Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being. She also is active on social media and passionate about public engagement and civics education. Along with Justice Rhonda Wood of Arkansas and Michigan Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, she is a founding co-host of Lady Justice: Women of the Court, a podcast featuring three women Supreme Court justices discussing the judicial branch of government and their experiences on their state’s highest appellate court.

Justice Walker is a 1987 graduate of Hillsdale College and a 1990 graduate of The Ohio State University College of Law. For more than 20 years, she concentrated her statewide private practice on labor and employment law and mediation as a partner with a regional law firm in West Virginia. Just prior to taking office, she was Associate General Counsel for WVU Medicine for 5 years. She is a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers.

Justice Walker is a 1999 graduate and former board chair of Leadership West Virginia. A lifelong Girl Scout, she also served as chair and long-time member of the board of directors of Girl Scouts of Black Diamond Council. She is currently serving as a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Charleston.

Charles “Chas” W. Wirken is an appellate lawyer with the Arizona law firm of Gust Rosenfeld, PLC.  He is a Fellow in the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and also Litigation Counsel of America.  Related recognitions include Chambers USA, Best Lawyers in America, and Southwest Super Lawyers.

He co-authored the Oral Argument chapter of the Arizona Appellate Handbook 2.0, and has served as a judge pro tem of the Arizona Court of Appeals and on the faculties of the State Bar of Arizona’s Appellate Practice Institute and Trial College. Before serving as President of the State Bar and in the ABA House of Delegates he co-founded the Arizona Bar’s Appellate Practice Section and chaired its Trial Practice Section. He is also a past-President of the Maricopa County Bar Association, was chosen Member of the Year, and inducted into the MCBA Hall of Fame.

Chas graduated from the University of Arizona College of Law in 1975 and since then has practiced in the United States Supreme Court, the Ninth, Tenth and Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal and Arizona’s appellate courts.

Hon. Rhonda K. Wood is in her sixteenth year on the bench. She served six years on the trial bench, two years on the Court of Appeals, and is in her eighth year as an Associate Justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court.  She recently ran unopposed and was reelected and thus will begin a 2nd eight-year term on the Supreme Court on January 1, 2023.

Justice Wood serves many legal organizations.  She is Certified Faculty for the National Center for State Courts, a Henry Toll Fellow, and serves on the American Bar Associations’ Appellate Judge Education Institute’s Education Committee.  Justice Wood is Chair of the Supreme Court’s Commission on Children, Youth, and Families. She founded and is co-host of the appellate podcast Lady Justice: Women of the Court with two other state supreme court justices from other states.

Justice Wood earned her B.A. with distinction in politics, magna cum laude, from Hendrix College, and her J.D. from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Bowen School of Law with highest honors.  She was the 1st recipient of the Dean’s Distinguished Certificate of Service.  She also received the highest score on the Arkansas Bar Examination.

Prior to becoming a judge, Wood practiced law with the Wood Law Firm and Williams and Anderson, PLLC. She was also an Assistant Dean, Bowen School of Law.

Gay Firestone Wray is an active participant in civic and charitable pursuits. Currently, she is the chairman for the Roger S. Firestone Foundation; co-chairman for the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute for American Democracy; Honorary Member and co-chairman for the Smithsonian National Board Alumni; chair for leadership at Phoenix Country Day School; life member of Barrows Neurological Women’s Board; a member of Hospice of the Valley; and a member of Christ Church of the Ascension Memorial Garden.  She also served as a director of Bank of America, Arizona.  Ms. Wray is a lifelong friend to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.