Nadeen Abou-Hossa is a commercial and appellate litigator at Gonzalez Chiscano Angulo & Kasson, PC in San Antonio. She provides litigation support at all stages of trial court proceedings and representation in civil appeals and mandamus proceedings. Previously, she worked as a Briefing Attorney and then a Staff Attorney at the Fourth Court of Appeals for Chief Justice Rebeca Martinez. Nadeen received her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and her J.D. from St Mary’s School of Law. While in law school, Nadeen interned for Hon. Ignacio Torteya, III at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
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Plenary 1 - Historical Facts: Past Present & Future
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Plenary 3: Supreme Court Preview
Break-out 1: McCulloch v. Maryland: One-Stop Shopping for Textual Interpretive Methods
Break-out 2: Other Side of the Lectern: Trading Places
Plenary 4: Why BOTher Writing?
Break-out 3: Fine Art of Rebuttal
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Break-out 5: The Supreme Court andthe American Constitutional System
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Break-out 8: Building/Maintaining an Appellate Practice
Break-out 9: Lexicon is Not a Fortress – Law & Linguistics
Break-out 10: Changing Voir Dire Standards
Plenary 9: A Joinder of Inspiration and Greatness in Civil Rights Legislation: The Words of Lincoln and King on the Anniversaries of the Gettysburg Address and “I Have a Dream” Speech
Break-out 11: Making Non-Argument Sections of Brief Persuasive
Break-out 12: Victims’ Rights, Sentencing Reform, and a Civilian-Military Dialogue on the Implementation of Criminal Justice Initiatives
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Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. A graduate of both Yale College and from Yale Law School in 1984, he clerked for then Judge (later Justice) Stephen Breyer. Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. He is Yale’s only living professor to have won the University’s unofficial “triple crown”—the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service.
Professor Amar’s work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in over four dozen cases—tops among living non-emeritus scholars. He regularly testifies before Congress at the invitation of both parties; and in surveys of judicial citations and/or scholarly citations, he typically ranks among America’s five most-cited mid-career legal scholars. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his most recent book, The Words that Made Us, Professor Amar unites history and law in a narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted.
Stephanie Barclay is Associate Professor of Law at Notre Dame. Her research focuses on the role our different democratic institutions play in protecting minority rights, particularly at the intersection of free speech and religious exercise. She directs Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative, which promotes freedom of religion or belief for all people through advocacy, student formation, and scholarship. Prior to joining the Notre Dame faculty, Barclay was an Associate Professor of Law at Brigham Young University Law School. She is a Faculty Affiliate at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School; and a Nootbaar Fellow at the Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics at Pepperdine University. She has served as the Chair for the AALS Law and Religion Section, and she currently serves as a Research Associate for the Centre for Constitutional Law and Legal Studies at the University of British Columbia, on the Steering Committee for the Quill Project at Pembroke College, on the Board of the UVU Center for Constitutional Studies, and on the Board for Bellwether International.
As a practitioner, Barclay litigated First Amendment cases in D.C. at both the trial and appellate levels. After graduating from BYU Law School, she clerked for Hon. N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Chad Baruch is a partner at Johson Tobey Baruch in Dallas, Texas, where he concentrates in family law appeals and civil appeals. He has served on the Texas State Bar Board of Directors, including as its Chairman, and as Chair of the Texas Bar College. Chad has been recognized among the Texas Super Lawyers from 2011-2022 by Thomson Reuters (and on the Top 100 in Texas list for 2020 and 2021). The author of articles published in various law reviews, Chad received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School.
Hon. William Boyce is a partner at Alexander Dubose and Jefferson LLP in Houston, Texas, where he pursues a wide-ranging appellate practice and serves as an arbitrator through the American Arbitration Association. He served as a justice on the Fourteenth Court of Appeals in Houston for 11 years after practicing law for 18 years as an associate and partner at Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P.
A former journalist, Bill graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and later went on to receive his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law. He clerked for the Hon. W. Eugene Davis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is vice-chair of the Judicial Commission on Mental Health; a member of the Supreme Court Advisory Committee; an elected member of the American Law Institute; a former adjunct faculty member at the University of Houston Law Center; a longstanding member of the State Bar of Texas and Houston Bar Association appellate practice sections.
Jay L. T. Breakstone is an appellate lawyer in private practice in New York. He has amassed considerable experience as both a trial and appellate litigator and serves as New York State Chair of the ABA Judicial Division’s Council of Appellate Lawyers, as well as Chair of the Appellate Practice Litigation Group of the AAJ. On the local level, he has just begun his eighth uninterrupted term as a Trustee of the Bellmore (New York) Union Free School District and is Past-President of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association, serving Long Island. He received his J.D. from Brooklyn Law School.
Hon. John G. Browning (Ret.) is currently a partner at Spencer Fane LLP. Previously he served as a justice on the Fifth District Court of Appeals in Dallas, Texas. He is the Distinguished Jurist in Residence and Professor of Law at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law in Montgomery, Alabama. He chairs the Institute for Law and Technology at the Center for American and International Law and is a trustee for the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society and the Texas Appellate Hall of Fame.
The author of several law books and multiple law review and other articles, Justice Browning received his B.A. from Rutgers University and his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law.
James Brudney is a professor at Fordham Law School, where he holds the Joseph Crowley Chair in Labor & Employment Law. He previously taught at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where he was Newton D. Baker-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law. At Fordham, Professor Brudney principally teaches Legislation and Regulation, Labor Law, and Employment Law. His scholarly writing is in the areas of statutory interpretation and workplace law.
He received a B.A. from Amherst College, a M.A. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, after which he clerked for Hon. Gerhard A. Gesell of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. and then for Justice Harry A Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. He was an associate at Bredhoff & Kaiser in Washington and then served for six years as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor. He was selected as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to do research and lecturing at Oxford University.
Kirsten M. Castañeda is a partner, Alexander Dubose & Jefferson LLP, where she practices appellate litigation, predominantly before the Texas courts of appeals, Texas Supreme Court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Kirsten is the current chair of the Judicial Division’s Council of Appellate Lawyers and is an active member of the ABA Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section. She serves on the State Bar Pattern Jury Charge-Oversight Committees and is Chair-Elect of the State Bar Appellate Section, as well as officer liaison to the Section’s Diversity Committee.
Samantha Chaifetz is a partner at DLA Piper (US) and co-chair of the firm’s Appellate Advocacy Practice. Prior to joining DLA Piper, Samantha was an appellate attorney for the Department of Justice’s Civil Division, where she successfully briefed and argued cases in federal courts of appeals across the country. In addition, Samantha previously served as Deputy Counsel to the Vice President and as a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.
Ms. Chaifetz received her B.A. from Harvard University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. She is currently a member of the Edward Coke American Inn of Court.
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.
Nina Chernoff is a Professor at the CUNY School of Law. Professor Chernoff’s research focuses on the right to a jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community. Her scholarship includes Wrong About the Right: How Courts Undermine the Fair Cross-Section Guarantee by Confusing it With Equal Protection (2012); Black to the Future: The State Action Doctrine & The White Jury (2019); and Preempting Jury Challenges: Strategies for Courts and Jury System Administrators, (co-authored with Dr. Joseph B. Kadane (2012)). Professor Chernoff also works with courts, lawyers, and communities seeking to diversify their jury pools and was a consultant to the New Jersey Judiciary.
Prior to joining CUNY’s faculty, Professor Chernoff was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University Law School. Before entering academia, she was a staff attorney in the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia (PDS). She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, an M.S. from American University’s School of Public Affairs, and a J.D. from Georgetown University. She clerked for Hon. Thomas L. Ambro of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Hon. J. Michelle Childs is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Previously, she was a U.S. district judge for the District of South Carolina and a judge on the South Carolina Circuit Court. She currently chairs the AJEI Education Committee. A former beauty pageant winner, she graduated from the University of South Florida and the University of South Carolina School of Law. She also earned a M.A. from the University of South Carolina Business School and subsequently earned an LL.M. in Judicial Studies from Duke University.
Judge Childs practiced employment and labor relations law with Nexsen Pruet in South Carolina and became the first African-American woman partner in that firm. She also worked in state government, serving as the deputy director of the division of labor with the South Carolina Department of Labor and as a commissioner on the South Carolina Workers’ Compensation Commission. She is very active with various local, state, and national bar organizations, as well as community organizations.
Judge Childs is 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 is married with one child.
Hon. Jennifer Choe-Groves is an Article III federal judge on the United States Court of International Trade in New York, New York.
Judge Choe-Groves began her professional career serving as an Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She served in the Executive Office of the President of the United States as Senior Director for Intellectual Property and Innovation and as Chair of the Special 301 Committee for the Office of the United States Trade Representative USTR. Prior to her appointment to the United States Court of International Trade, Judge Choe-Groves was in private practice specializing in intellectual property, litigation, and international trade. She is Chair of the National Tang Moot Court Competition of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Law Foundation. She received an A.B. from Princeton University, a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law-Newark, and a LL.M. from Columbia Law School. Prior to college, she also studied piano at the Juilliard School.
Emily Colbert is Senior Vice-President of Product Management at Thomson Reuters. She leads the global product management teams for Practical Law, Checkpoint and Regulatory Intelligence. Emily joined Thomson Reuters with the Practical Law acquisition in 2013.
Before joining Practical Law and Thomson Reuters, Emily was an M&A associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where she represented both financial and strategic clients in private and public M&A, private equity and general corporate matters.
Bennett Evan Cooper is a partner at Dickinson Wright in Arizona, where he specializes in appellate litigation. Ben is the author of Thomson Reuters’s 1,000-page treatise Federal Appellate Practice: Ninth Circuit, and he is a current member of the Ninth Circuit’s Advisory Committee on Rules of Practice and Internal Operating Procedures. Ben is a past Chair of the American Bar Association’s Council of Appellate Lawyers and of the State Bar of Arizona’s Appellate Practice Section, Intellectual Property Section, and E-Commerce & Technology Section.
Ben received both his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University, where he was Executive Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. He clerked for Hon. Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is the lead author of Thomson Reuters’s Arizona Trial Handbook and the longest-serving member of the State Bar of Arizona’s Civil Jury Instructions Committee.
Laurie Webb Daniel is a partner in Webb Daniel Friedlander, an appellate boutique in Atlanta, Georgia. Previously, she served as Chair of Holland & Knight’s National Appellate Team. She is a civil litigation generalist with an appellate specialty, often working with trial teams to achieve the best result for her clients. She has served twice as chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Amicus Curiae Briefs. She also was part of the ABA’s “reading group” that vetted the writings of U.S. Supreme Court Nominee, now Justice, Sonia Sotomayor. Ms. Daniel received a B.A. from Reed College and a J.D. from the University of Oregon School of Law.
Mark Davies is a partner at Orrick and a former Co-Chair of the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group. He is the author of the “user manual” for Federal Circuit appeals, Patent Appeals: The Elements of Effective Advocacy in the Federal Circuit (2017) and the recent legal treatise Artificial Intelligence: Law & Litigation (2023). Before private practice, Mark served as a member of the Appellate Staff of the Civil Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (1999-2006), where he represented the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the Copyright Office, the International Trade Commission and other federal agencies in federal court litigation.
He received a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. Mark clerked for Hon. Karen LeCraft Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
CDR Sara de Groot is currently serving as the Operations Officer for the Navy’s Victims’ Legal Counsel Program. She received her A.B. in Music from Bryn Mawr College. After college, she worked as a paralegal at a medium sized litigation firm in Houston before earning her J.D. from Tulane University School of Law. She accepted a commission with the Navy via the JAG Corps Student Program during her 2L year.
CDR de Groot’s Navy service has taken her to Yokosuka, Japan; Manama, Bahrain; Newport, RI; Annapolis, MD; Mayport, FL; Jacksonville, FL and Washington D.C. She has held a variety of other positions, including legal assistance attorney, defense attorney, trial counsel, staff judge advocate, and Naval Justice School instructor. She did a tour in Iraq as an individual augmentee with TF-134/Detainee Operations as the Officer in Charge of Legal HQ.
In 2013, CDR de Groot was hand selected by the JAG to be the first Victims’ Legal Counsel for the Navy, stationed at the United States Naval Academy, to assist midshipmen and sailors who are victims of sexual assault navigate the military justice system. She is a member of the Military Justice Litigation Career Track. Prior to her current position, she served as the Senior Trial Counsel for the Southeast region and then the Executive Officer at Region Legal Service Office Naval District Washington.
Hon. Albert Diaz is the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Judge Diaz served in the U.S. Marines and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the New York University School of Law. He also earned a Master of Science in Business Administration from Boston University.
While serving in the Marines, Judge Diaz served as a prosecutor, defense counsel, and appellate government counsel. He left active duty in 1995 for private practice but remained in the Marine Reserves, serving as an appellate defense counsel, military trial judge, and appellate military judge. He retired from the Marines with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Judge Diaz also served on the North Carolina Superior Court bench, including service on North Carolina’s Business Court. He has been involved with the Mecklenburg County Bar Diversity & Inclusion Committee since shortly after its founding in 2004, and during his leadership of this committee created Lunch with a Lawyer, a mentorship program for rising ninth graders. Judge Diaz was also one of a small group responsible for the creation of the Mecklenburg County Hispanic Latino Lawyers Bar.
Hon. Herbert Dixon is a senior judge with the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He is chair of the ABA Journal Board of Editors, the technology columnist for The Judges’ Journal, and a former member of the ABA Techshow® Planning Board. He is a former chair of the National Conference of State Trial Judges, former chair of the ABA Standing Committee on the American Judicial System, and former chair of the Judicial Division’s Book Editorial Board.
Bobby Donaldson, a native of Augusta, Georgia, Dr. Bobby Donaldson serves as an Associate Professor of History, the Executive Director of the Center for Civil Rights History and Research, and the James E and Emily E. Clyburn Endowed Chair of Public Service and Civic Engagement at the University of South Carolina-Columbia. He received his undergraduate degree in Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from Emory University. A scholar of southern history and African American life and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dr. Donaldson’s research and writings explore African American intellectual thought, print culture, education and religion. Additionally, he has served as a consultant for museum exhibitions, archival collections, oral history initiatives, documentary films, and historic preservation projects.
Dr. Donaldson has been the recipient of several academic fellowships and has served as an editorial assistant for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Emory and Stanford universities. After nine years of service, he was named a trustee emeritus of Wesleyan University in 2015.
John Elwood is a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he heads the firm’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice. He clerked for Justice Kennedy and served as an assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General and as the senior deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel. He taught the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at the University of Virginia for nearly a decade, and he has argued 10 cases before the Court.
Joshua Fairfield is a professor at Washington & Lee University Law School. He is an internationally recognized law and technology scholar, specializing in digital property, artificial intelligence, big data privacy, and virtual communities. He has written on the law and regulation of e-commerce and online contracts and on the application of standard economic models to virtual environments. His current research focuses on privacy, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence.
Professor Fairfield consults with U.S. government agencies, including the White House Office of Technology and the Homeland Security Privacy Office, on national security, privacy, and law enforcement within online communities and as well as on strategies for protecting children online. He received a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago. Before entering the law, Professor Fairfield was a technology entrepreneur, serving as the director of research and development for language-learning software company Rosetta Stone.
Matthew Friedlander is an appellate litigator and founding partner of Webb Daniel Friedlander, LLP. While the focus of Mr. his practice is appellate advocacy in state and federal courts, he has experience representing a diverse array of clients in complex, high-value commercial and casualty disputes at all stages of the litigation process. A native of Illinois, Mr. Friedlander received a B.A. in philosophy from Emory University and a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law. After law school, Mr. Friedlander worked at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals as a Staff Attorney, then as a term clerk for the Hon. Frank M. Hull. He currently serves as a Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the American Bar Association’s Council of Appellate Lawyers and is the Chair of the its Membership Committee.
Gaëtan Gerville-Réache is a partner in the Appellate and Supreme Court Practice Group at Warner Norcross & Judd LLP, in Grand Rapid, Michigan. He handles appellate matters predominantly before the Michigan Supreme Court, the Michigan Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He is a past Chair of the Appellate Practice Section for the State Bar of Michigan and was honored in 2016 to be appointed by Michigan’s Governor to a four-year term on the Military Appeals Tribunal for the Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. Prior to law school, Gaëtan served as a Surface Warfare Officer in the United States Navy. He received both his B.A. and his J.D. from Northwestern University.
Daniel L. Geyser is the Chair of Haynes and Boone’s U.S. Supreme Court practice and a member of its appellate group. In the past half-decade, Dan ranks among the top five lawyers nationwide for total Supreme Court arguments in private practice. Dan also handles appellate matters around the country in both federal and state appellate courts. He received a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was the Notes Chair of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, Dan clerked for the Hon. Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has received the State Bar of California’s Wiley W. Manuel Award for Pro Bono Legal Services and is a past appointee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Pro Bono Panel.
Elaine Goldenberg is a partner at Munger Tolles & Olson, where her practice focuses on appellate and Supreme Court litigationy. Before joining Munger Tolles in 2017, she served for five years as an Assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice. She has argued 12 times before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Deepak Gupta is the founding principal of Gupta Wessler, where his practice focuses on Supreme Court, appellate, and complex litigation. He is also a Lecturer at Harvard Law School, where he teaches the Harvard Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. Before founding his firm in 2012, Deepak helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the first appellate lawyer hired at the new agency. He has filed over one hundred briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has argued five times before the Court.
Elissa Haynes is a partner and Co-Chair of Freeman Mathis & Gary’s National Appellate Practice Group in Atlanta. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia and her law degree at Loyola University. Her trial and appellate practice is focused primarily on defending cases involving negligent security, premises liability, trucking, and high-exposure catastrophic injury cases. She also serves as general counsel for several companies, including a towing company, a medical billing expert, and several convenience store owners and operators.
Ms. Haynes serves as Co-Chair of the Georgia Defense Lawyers Association’s (GDLA) Amicus Curiae Committee where she is tasked with reviewing amicus requests from GDLA members as well as authoring briefs on issues significant to the defense bar. An active member of the legal community, she has served as the 75th President of the State Bar of Georgia’s Young Lawyers Division and on the State Bar of Georgia’s Executive Committee from 2020-2023.
Hon. Toby Heytens is a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. A graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the University of Virginia School of Law, he clerked for Chief Judge Edward Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court.
After his clerkships, Judge Heytens next spent several years working in Washington, DC, first in private practice and then at the Department of Justice’s Office of the Solicitor General. From 2010 until 2018, Judge Heytens was a law professor at the University of Virginia, where he taught civil procedure, civil rights litigation, and the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic and helped coach UVA’s three-time national champion trial advocacy team. From 2018 until 2021, Judge Heytens served as Solicitor General of Virginia.
Hon. James C. Ho has been a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit since 2018. Prior to that, he was a partner and co-chair of the national Appellate and Constitutional Law practice group of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and also served as Solicitor General of Texas. Judge Ho has served in all three branches of the federal government. On the Senate Judiciary Committee, he served as chief counsel of the Subcommittees on the Constitution and Immigration under Senator John Cornyn. At the Justice Department, he served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and an attorney-advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel. He clerked for Hon. Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Hon. Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Ho received a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law, where he also serves as an Adjunct Professor. He is married with two children. has been a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit since 2018. Prior to that, he was a partner and co-chair of the national Appellate and Constitutional Law practice group of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and also served as Solicitor General of Texas. Judge Ho has served in all three branches of the federal government. On the Senate Judiciary Committee, he served as chief counsel of the Subcommittees on the Constitution and Immigration under Senator John Cornyn. At the Justice Department, he served as Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and an attorney-advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel. He clerked for Hon. Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Hon. Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Ho received a B.A. from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law, where he also serves as an Adjunct Professor. He is married with two children.
Hon. Lucy Inman is Senior Counsel at Milberg Weiss in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she concentrates on appellate litigation. She previously served as both a trial and appellate judge in that state. She received a B.A. from North Carolina State University and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill, where she served as an articles editor for The North Carolina Law Review. She clerked for Chief Justice Exum of the North Carolina Supreme Court and practiced civil litigation for 18 years, first in Los Angeles, then in Raleigh.
Judge Inman serves on the Judicial Independence Committee of the National Association of Women Judges. She has served in leadership roles in the North Carolina Bar Association and the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys. She is married with two adult children.
Hon. Brett M. Kavanaugh is an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. A native of Washington, D.C., he is married with two children. He received a B.A. from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Thereafter he served as a law clerk for Judge Walter Stapleton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, for Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. He practiced law in the Justice Department, first in the Office of the Solicitor General afterward in the Office of Independent Counsel, and later in private practice in Washington. From 2001 to 2003, he was Associate Counsel and then Senior Associate Counsel to President George W. Bush. From 2003 to 2006, he was Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary for President Bush. He was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006 and was nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018.
Juvaria Khan is a civil rights litigator who founded The Appellate Project in 2019. After clerking for Hon. Michael P. Shea in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, Juvaria worked at the law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, where she maintained a heavy pro bono practice focusing on racial and religious discrimination claims. She then served as a Senior Staff Attorney at Muslim Advocates, where she successfully combined litigation and public campaign strategies in cases ranging from public accommodation claims to religious land use lawsuits. Juvaria received a B.A. from New York University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She is a member of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court and former president of the Capital Area Muslim Bar Association.
Hon. Scott J. Laurer is a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Previously, he served as Deputy Legal Counsel to the National Security Council. There he advised senior White House leaders and the staffs of the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.
Judge Laurer served in the United States Navy for 30 years, retiring from active duty as a captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He has served as Special Counsel to the Chief of Naval Operations; Commanding Officer, U.S. Region Legal Service Office Europe, Africa, and Southwest Asia; Special Legal Advisor to Commander, International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces-Afghanistan; Senior Legal Advisor to Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command; and Deputy Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A native of Woodbury, New Jersey, Judge Laurer graduated from Rutgers University, earned his J.D. from Temple University School of Law and an LL.M. in international law from The George Washington University Law School.
Matthew Leerberg co-chairs Fox Rothschild’s Appellate Practice Group. After receiving his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his law degree is from Duke University, he served as law clerk for Hon. Allyson Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Matt recently co-authored a comprehensive legal treatise on North Carolina Appellate Practice and Procedure. He is a board certified Specialist in Appellate Practice by the North Carolina State Bar and is chair of the Appellate Rules Committee of the North Carolina Bar Association.
Marin K. Levy is a professor at the Duke University School of Law. Her principal academic inteests include judicial administration, civil procedure, remedies, and federal courts. She currently serves as the Director of Duke’s Program in Public Law, and is the Faculty Director of the Bolch Judicial Institute. Levy is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and has testified before Congress and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. She is the author (or co-author) of multiple law review articles as well as legal treatises.
Professor Levy received a B.A. from Yale College, a M. Phil. From the University of Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review. She clerked for Hon. José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was an associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C.
Hon. Eric Magnuson is a partner at Robins Kaplan LLP and head of the firm’s Appellate Practice Group. He was Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court from 2008-2010. Eric has served as an associate professor of law at William Mitchell College of Law and the University of St. Thomas School of Law and has taught at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He is a Fellow and Past President of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, a Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, and the founding president of the Eighth Circuit Bar Association.
Justice Magnuson received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota and a J.D. from the William Mitchell College of Law. He has many books and articles to his credit, including treatises on federal appeals and Minnesota appellate practice.
Deanne Maynard is a partner at Morrison & Foerster LLP and co-chairs the firm’s Appellate and Supreme Court practice. She has argued 14 times in the U.S. Supreme Court, and dozens of times in federal circuit courts, particularly the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. She has successfully represented both patentees and defendants on a wide range of technologies, including pharmaceuticals, software, consumer electronics, and medical devices. Deanne has been ranked Band 1 by Chambers for both nationwide appeals and intellectual-property appeals. Deanne also serves as Chair of the Federal Circuit’s Advisory Council and is a Fellow in the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.
She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before joining Morrison & Foerster, Deanne clerked for Hon. Stanley Harris on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and two terms in the U.S. Supreme Court, one for Hon. Stephen Breyer and another for Hon. Lewis Powell (Ret.) and Hon. John Paul Stevens. She also worked in the was an Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General.
Hon. Christopher J. McFadden is a judge on the Court of Appeals of Georgia. After graduating from Oglethorpe University and from the University of Georgia School of Law, he opened his own law office and remained a sole practitioner until he joined the Court of Appeals. Judge McFadden is a co-author of a treatise on Georgia Appellate Practice and a founding past Chair of the Appellate Practice Section of the State Bar of Georgia. He also served as an officer or director of the Atlanta Bar Association.
Judge McFadden is an elected member of The American Law Institute. He has 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, Federalist Society, American Constitution Society, Saint Thomas More Society and of Oglethorpe University’s Stormy Petrel Bar Association. He currently serves as Vice Chair of the Executive Committee of the ABA Appellate Judges Conference.
Judge McFadden is married with one child.
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.
William Frederick Meinecke, Jr. is a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He received his undergraduate degree in German and History from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 1983. He attended the universities of Bonn and Berlin in Germany and received his M.A. (1988) and Ph.D. (1998) in history from the University of Maryland at College Park. The title of his dissertation was Conflicting Loyalties: The Supreme Court in Weimar and Nazi Germany 1918-1945. In 1992, Meinecke joined the staff of the Museum’s Wexner Learning Center to help design a multimedia program on the Holocaust, the Historical Atlas of the Holocaust (book and CD-ROM), and a website for students. Since 2000, Dr. Meinecke has worked with law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors, and attorneys in the Museum’s Law, Justice, and the Holocaust training program. His book, Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust, was published by the Museum in December 2007.
Hon. Edwina G. Richardson Mendelson is Deputy Chief Administrative Judge Edwina Mendelson is Deputy Chief Administrative Judge for the New York State Unified Court System, where she heads the newly expanded Office for Justice Initiatives, tasked with ensuring meaningful access to justice for all New Yorkers in civil, criminal and family courts, regardless of income, background, or special needs. Additionally, Judge Mendelson leads the Equal Justice in Courts Initiative, a top priority for former New York State Chief Judge Janet DiFiore. She also directs several juvenile and family justice initiatives, including the New York State
Unified Court System’s Child Welfare Court Improvement Project, its Advisory Council on Child Fatalities, the ongoing implementation of the seminal law raising the age of criminal responsibility in New York State, and the Child Support and Guardianship Working Groups of the Unified Court System/New York State Bar Association’s COVID-19 Recovery Task Force.
Judge Mendelson now also oversees the Unified Court System’s Office of Policy & Planning, which is responsible for administering the state’s 343 problem-solving and accountability courts, including groundbreaking opioid courts, drug courts/judicial diversion parts, veterans’ treatment courts, mental health courts, human trafficking intervention courts, domestic violence courts, integrated domestic violence courts, young adult parts, juvenile treatment courts, community courts, and impaired driving courts. She received a J.D. from CUNY Law School and also has a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice.
Hon. Gregory E. Mize is a senior judge on the Superior Court for the District of Columbia. He is a judicial fellow at the National Center for State Courts where he works with NCSC’s Center for Jury Studies to help courts improve their jury trial systems. Before joining the trial bench, Judge Mize was a trial lawyer and then General Counsel to the District of Columbia City Council. He is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He received an A.B. from Loyola University Chicago and a J.D. from Georgetown University.
Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Prior to that he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History at Harvard and previously the James Bryce Professor of European Legal History at Columbia University’s history department. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory.
Professor Moyn received an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis, a Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley, and a J.D. from Harvard University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. In addition, he cofounded and for a decade served as coeditor of the journal Humanity and for seven years served as coeditor of Modern Intellectual History. He solicits book reviews on human rights for Lawfare and is on the editorial boards of Constellations, Global Intellectual History, the Historical Journal, Humanity, the Journal of the History of International Law, Modern Intellectual History, and Modern Judaism.
Kip Nelson is a partner at Fox Rothschild LLP, where he specializes in appellate litigation. In addition to his appellate practice, Kip is a contributing author on the North Carolina Appellate Practice Blog, which provides news, information, and tips for practicing law in North Carolina’s state and federal appellate courts. Kip is also a member of the North Carolina Bar Association’s Appellate Rules Committee and serves on the leadership council of the NCBA’s Appellate Practice Section. He is currently on the executive board of the ABA’s Council of Appellate Lawyers and serves as the Rules Committee Chair.
Kip received a B.S. from Brigham Young University, a J.D. from Duke University School of Law, and an LL.M. in Law and Entrepreneurship from Duke.
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.
John P. O’Herron is a partner at Thompson McMullan, P.C., where he concentrates in appellate litigation and motions practice in both state and federal courts. He has represented businesses, individuals, and government officers and agencies. His practice includes serving as embedded appellate counsel, consultation regarding both pre- and post-trial motions, briefing and argument, and amicus curiae representation.
John maintains RichmondAppeals.com, a website dedicated to his appellate practice and recent and impending changes in the field of appellate law. He serves as a member of the Joint Alternative Dispute Resolution Committee Council’s Special Committee to study Appellate Mediation in Virginia. He is the Vice-Chair of the Appellate Section of the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel and the Virginia State Chair for the Council of Appellate Lawyers, a division of the ABA. John joined Thompson McMullan after clerking for Chief Justice Cynthia D. Kinser of the Supreme Court of Virginia.
Hon. John B. Owens serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to becoming a federal judge in 2014, he was a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP (where he focused on white collar investigations and appellate matters), and a federal prosecutor in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, and San Diego. He served as the Chief of the Criminal Division in the U.S Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he was an Executive Editor on the Stanford Law Review, and afterwards went on to clerk for Hon. J. Clifford Wallace on the Ninth Circuit and Hon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. He has authored several law review articles and resides with his family in San Diego.
Karen S. Precella is co-chair of Haynes & Boone’s Appellate Practice Group. A member of the American Law Institute. Karen speaks and writes frequently on appellate issues and has earned a state-wide reputation in Texas on jury charge and mandamus procedures through her legal writing and bar service. She is a contributing author for two ABA books—A Practitioner’s Guide to Appellate Advocacy (Anne Marie Lofaso ed., 2011), and The Class Action Fairness Act: Law and Strategy (2022) – and for several years taught legal writing at the Texas A&M School of Law. Karen also served on the board of editors for the Texas Bar Journal, co-chair of the Appellate Practice Committee of the ABA Section of Litigation, council member of the State Bar of Texas Appellate Section, and chair of the Tarrant County Appellate and Business Litigation Sections.
Hon. Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar is the 48th Solicitor General of the United States. Prior to her confirmation in that role, she worked in the Solicitor General’s office for several years, including as Principal Deputy Solicitor General and Acting Solicitor General. A native of Boise, Idaho, she received a B.A. from Emory University and a M.A. from the University of St. Andrews. She subsequently spent a year living and studying in St. Petersburg, Russia as a Fulbright Fellow. She earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an Articles Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan. After her clerkships, she worked as an associate in the appellate group at Hogan Lovells LLP and later became a partner at Cooley LLP, where she focused on Supreme Court and appellate litigation. She is married with two children.
Captain Stephen Reyes is the Chief Trial Judge for the Navy-Marine Corps Trial Judiciary. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Davis, his J.D. from the University of the Pacific, and an LL.M. from Harvard University. He is a member of the Military Justice Litigation Career Track and is a designated Expert. He is authorized to wear the Legion of Merit (x2), Defense Meritorious Service Medal (x2), the Navy Meritorious Service Medal (x2), the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (x3), and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. The author of several articles on military justice, Captain Reyes is married with three children and currently resides in Woodbridge, Virginia.
Harker Rhodes is a partner at Clement & Murphy, where he concentrates on Supreme Court and appellate litigation in civil, criminal, and bankruptcy cases. He also has experience advising clients in out-of-court mediation proceedings, and counseling clients faced with significant litigation or regulatory risks.
Harker is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School, where he was Managing Editor of the Stanford Law Review. He clerked for Hon. Rya W. Zobel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also a member of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court and a former Temple Bar Scholar. In his spare time, Harker enjoys skiing, playing squash, and visiting our national parks.
Hon. Mark E. Salter is a Justice on the South Dakota Supreme Court. Justice Salter received a B.S. from South Dakota State University and a J.D. from the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. After clerking for a Minnesota state court, Justice Salter served on active duty in the United States Navy and later served in the United States Naval Reserve. He was a partner in a Sioux Falls law firm before he returned to public service in 2004 with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of South Dakota.
Justice Salter was appointed to the general jurisdiction trial court bench in 2013 by Governor Daugaard and served as a circuit court judge until his appointment to the Supreme Court in 2018. Justice Salter served as the presiding judge of the Minnehaha County Veterans Treatment Court from its inception in 2016 until 2019. He also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. He is married with four children and one grandchild.
James Sample is a law professor at Hofstra University. Previously, he served as an attorney in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. He has written several publications and legal briefs on the topic of judicial elections, campaign financing and recusal.
Professor Sample earned a B.A. from Boston College and a J.D. from Columbia University, where he was a notes editor for the Columbia Law Review. Afterward, he clerked for Hon. Sidney R. Thomas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Eric J. Segall is the Ashe Family Chair Professor of Law at the Georgia State University College of Law. A graduate of Emory University and Vanderbilt Law School, he clerked for the Chief Judge Charles Moye Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, and Albert J. Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. After his clerkships, Segall worked for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and the U.S. Department of Justice, before joining the Georgia State faculty in 1991.
Professor Segall teaches federal courts and constitutional law. He is the author of several books and multiple law review articles about constsitutional law and about the Supreme Court. He is a frequent op-ed contributor and has appeared on
numerous local and national radio shows.
Kannon Shanmugam is a partner at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He is chair of the firm’s Supreme Court and appellate litigation practice and managing partner of the Washington office. Kannon is widely recognized as one of the nation’s top appellate litigators. Kannon has argued 35 cases before the Supreme Court, including 15 cases in the last five years. In all, he has argued over 100 appeals in courts across the country, including arguments in all thirteen federal courts of appeals and in numerous state courts. Prior to private practice, Kannon served as an Assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and to Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Neil S. Siegel is the David W. Ichel Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Duke Law School, where he also serves as director of the Summer Institute on Law and Policy. Professor Siegel’s research and teaching fall primarily in the areas of U.S. constitutional law, constitutional politics, and constitutional theory. Professor Siegel served as special counsel to U.S. Senator Christopher Coons during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, and he advised Senator Coons during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Neil M. Gorsuch. He also served as special counsel to U.S. Senator Joseph R. Biden during the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings of John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito.
He received a B.A. and a M.A. from Duke University, a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, together with a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. He clerked for Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General. Professor Siegel is a member of the American Law Institute and the Bar of the State of North Carolina.
Lauren Britsch Slater is a Senior Counsel and Victim Policy Coordinator at the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. She is a federal prosecutor with over eight years of experience investigating and prosecuting complex cases involving victims of sexual exploitation and public corruption, including trying cases with the testimony of minor victims and vulnerable foreign victims. She advises on victims’ rights issues, including developing Division-wide policies and strategies for enhancing victim-centered approaches to prosecutions. She is a recipient of the Assistant Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service (x2) and Assistant Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service (x2). Ms. Slater received her B.A. from Tulane University and her J.D. from Georgetown University, and she in 2013-14 served as a law clerk to Hon. Daniel P. Jordan III, United States District Judge for the Southern District of Mississippi.
Hon. John E. Sparks, Jr. was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces on April 8, 2016. Judge Sparks is a native of Mount Holly, New Jersey, and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in July 1971. He was selected for the Naval Academy Preparatory School (NAPS) program and was sent to Naval Training Center Bainbridge, Maryland for eight months of instruction. After completing the NAPS program, he received an appointment to the United States Naval Academy and began the course of instruction as a midshipman in July 1972. Upon graduation from the Academy in June 1976, Judge Sparks accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. He spent the first seven years of his career as an infantry officer and held billets typical for that occupational specialty such as platoon commander, assistant operations officer, rifle company executive officer and rifle company commander. In 1983, he was accepted to the Marine Corps Excess Leave Law Program and began the study of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He was admitted to the Connecticut Bar in 1986 and was certified as a Marine Corps judge advocate.
Between 1986 and 1996 Judge Sparks served in a variety of legal positions including military prosecutor, defense counsel, legal adviser to a naval hospital, three years as a military judge and two years as Military Assistant and Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the Navy. In May 1996, he was assigned to the White House to serve as a Deputy Legal Adviser to the National Security Council. In January 1998, after twenty-three years of service to the U.S. Marine Corps, he retired and was asked by Secretary Dan Glickman, Secretary of Agriculture, to serve as his Special Assistant for Civil Rights. There he was responsible for coordinating the various civil rights activities and issues for the department. Judge Sparks also was instrumental in the settlement of a class action law suit against the department by African American farmers. In January 1999, he joined the Department of the Navy as the Principal Deputy General Counsel of the Navy where he was vested with full authority to act for and with the General Counsel in all legal matters affecting the Department of the Navy.
In December 2000, Judge Sparks joined the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces as the senior legal advisor to then Judge and later Chief Judge James E. Baker. He served in that position until retirement from federal service on July 31, 2015.
Judge Sparks lives in Virginia with his wife, Wendy. They have three grown children.
Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP
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.
Dwight Sullivan is the Senior Associate Deputy General Counsel for Military Justice and Personnel Policy in the Department of Defense Office of General Counsel. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the George Washington University Law School and a retired colonel in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. Previous positions include chief defense counsel of the military commission system, senior litigation counsel and acting chief of the Air Force Appellate Defense Division, and managing attorney of the American Civil Liberties of Maryland’s Baltimore office. He spent the first 10 years of his legal career as an active duty Marine Corps judge advocate. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Maryland College Park, a J.D. from the University of Virginia, and an LL.M. from The Judge Advocate General’s School, U.S. Army.
He and his wife live on Maryland’s Broadneck Peninsula.
Hon. Frank Sullivan, Jr. was appointed Professor of Practice at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 2012 after 19 years as a Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court. In 2018, he was named an Indiana University Bicentennial Professor. A graduate of Dartmouth College and the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, he earned an LL.M. at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Sullivan is active in the legal profession and the Indianapolis community. He is a Commissioner from Indiana to the Uniform Law Commission (also known as the National Conference of Commissioners of Uniform State Laws) and a member of the American Law Institute.
Sullivan was appointed in 1993 by Governor Evan Bayh to the Indiana Supreme Court where he authored approximately 500 majority opinions during his tenure. He was also active in the Court’s administrative work, chairing its multi-million dollar project to equip Indiana courts with modern technology.
While on the Court, Sullivan was also active in the Appellate Judges Conference of the American Bar Association, serving as its Chair in 2008-2009 and Chair of the Board of Directors of its affiliated Appellate Judges Education Institute in 2009-2010. He has been a leader since its inception of the ABA’s Judicial Clerkship Program that encourages minority law students to seek judicial clerkships.
Hon. Samuel Anderson Thumma is a judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals and previously served as its Chief Judge. Sam is chair of the Appellate Judges Education Institute, Inc., Board of Directors, immediate past chair of the ABA Judicial Division’s Appellate Judges Conference, Judicial Division Liaison to the Section of Litigation. Sam is a Uniform Law Commissioner, where he serves as Secretary and a member of the Executive Committee, chairs the Drafting Committee on Updating the Uniform Determination of Death Act and serves and has served on various Study, Drafting and other Committees. A member of the American Law Institute, he currently is an Advisor to the Restatement of the Law (Third) of Torts: Remedies project. Sam also serves on the Joint Technology Committee of the National Center for State Courts. In Arizona, Sam currently chairs the Arizona Commission on Access to Justice; co-chairs the COVID-19 Continuity of Court Operations During Public Health Emergency Workgroup, and is a member of the Committee on Juvenile Courts. Previously, he served as co-editor of the Arizona Appellate Handbook.
Sam graduated from Iowa State University and received his J.D. from the the University of Iowa College of Law in 1988, where he was a Note & Comment Editor on the Iowa Law Review. He clerked for former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Stanley G. Feldman and for Judge David R. Hansen, United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa. He was an associate at Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. and a partner at Perkins Coie in Phoenix. Recently, he earned an LL.M. from the Duke University School of Law. Author of a number of articles, Sam co-teaches evidence at Arizona State University College of Law and has taught Remedies both there and at the University of Arizona College of Law.
Cynthia Keely Timms is Chair of the Appellate Practice Group at Locke Lord LLP. She is a graduate of Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma College of Law.
Hon. Shirley Troutman has served on the New York Court of Appeals since 2021. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a J.D. from Albany Law School. She began her legal career as an Assistant District Attorney in Erie County, then served as an Assistant Attorney General and as an Assistant United States Attorney representing the State of New York and the United States in civil litigation. She has also served as an adjunct professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law. Her service in the New York judiciary began with the Buffalo City Court, then the Erie County Court, and subsequently on the New York State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division, Fourth Department.
She has served as co-chair of the Franklin H. Williams Judicial Commission, National Association of Women Judges New York Chapter President, a member of the Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, and a member of the Ethics Commission of New York State Unified Court System.
Hon. Thomas I. Vanaskie co-chairs Stevens & Lee’s Appellate Practice Group and chairs the firm’s Mediation, Neutral Services and Alternative Dispute Resolution Practice Group. Previously, he was Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania and a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He received a B.A. from Lycoming College and a J.D. from Penn State Dickinson School of Law.
In May of 2021, he was appointed by the President of the Pennsylvania Bar Association to serve as chair of a statewide task force to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on delivery of legal services and to make recommendations to mitigate the disruption of services resulting from future catastrophes. The task force generated a comprehensive report that will serve as the foundation for enhancing the use of technology to assure that legal services will be delivered despite widespread disasters.
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. Frank J. Williams is the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island and is one of the country’s most renowned experts on Abraham Lincoln. He is the author or editor of over fourteen books, has contributed chapters to several others and has lectured on the subject throughout the country. He has amassed an unsurpassed private library and archive that ranks among the nation’s largest and finest Lincoln collections. In 2000, he was appointed to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission created by Congress to plan events to commemorate the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln in 2009.
Justice Williams is currently at work on an annotated bibliography of all the Lincoln titles published since 1865 for Southern Illinois University Press for which he is also writing Lincoln as Hero. His book of essays, Judging Lincoln, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2002. He, with Harold Holzer and Edna Greene Medford, has written The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views, Social, Legal and Pictorial just published by Louisiana State University Press. His latest book, Lincoln Lessons: Reflections on America’s Greatest Leader, with William D. Pederson, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2009.
On December 30, 2003, President George W. Bush invited Chief Justice Williams to be a member of the then Military Commissions Review Panel for tribunals to be held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with the rank of Major General. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 created the Court of Military Commission Review on which Williams served as a civilian appellate judge and later as Chief Judge.
Jonathan Wroblewski is the Director of the Office of Policy and Legislation in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He leads a team of data scientists and attorneys in developing, reviewing, and evaluating national crime, sentencing, and corrections policy and legislation and in using analytics to improve federal enforcement programs. Jonathan represents the Department on the Judicial Conference’s Advisory Committee on the Criminal Rules, the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Council, and as the Attorney’s General’s representative on the United States Sentencing Commission. He is also a lecturer at the Harvard Law School and Director of the law school’s Semester in Washington Program.
A former prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division, Jonathan served as Deputy General Counsel and then Director of Legislative Affairs at the U.S. Sentencing Commission. In 1998, he rejoined the Department of Justice in the Criminal Division’s Office of Policy and Legislation and subsequently led the Department’s Office of Legal Policy, serving as the primary policy advisor to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General. He received a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from Stanford University.
Gust Rosenfeld, PLC
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.
Arkansas Supreme Court
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.
Chairman, Roger S. Firestone Foundation
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.