Biographies of 2022 Supreme Court Preview Panelists
ROBERT BARNES - Washington Post
Robert Barnes has spent most of his career at The Washington Post, as a reporter and editor. He joined the paper to cover politics in 1987, and has covered campaigns at the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial level. He served in various editing positions, including metropolitan editor, deputy national editor in charge of domestic issues and the Supreme Court, and national political editor.
He returned to reporting to cover the Supreme Court in November 2006, and has done so since then, with a brief break to cover the conclusion of the 2008 presidential campaign. A native Floridian, he gave up law school plans for a life in newspapers after taking a journalism class at the University of Florida.
STEPHANOS BIBAS - U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
Stephanos Bibas is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Judge Bibas was previously a professor of law and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As director of the Penn Law Supreme Court Clinic, he argued six cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and filed briefs in dozens of others. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1989 with a B.A. in political theory and from Oxford University in 1991 with a B.A. in jurisprudence. He then earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994. After graduating from Yale Law, Judge Bibas clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court and was a litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, D.C.
Thereafter, Judge Bibas served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he successfully prosecuted the world’s leading expert in Tiffany stained glass for hiring a grave robber to steal priceless Tiffany windows from cemeteries. Before his tenure at Penn Law, Judge Bibas taught at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Iowa College of Law and was a research fellow at Yale Law School. He has published two books and more than sixty scholarly articles.
JOAN BISKUPIC - CNN
Joan Biskupic is a full-time CNN legal analyst and author of a 2019 biography of Chief Justice John Roberts. Before joining CNN in 2017, Biskupic was an editor-in-charge for Legal Affairs at Reuters and, previously, the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism in 2015.
In addition to her latest biography, The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts, Biskupic is the author of books on Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Sonia Sotomayor. Before joining CNN, she spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine, law school. A native of Chicago, Biskupic holds a law degree from Georgetown University and lives in Washington, D.C.
JESS BRAVIN - Wall Street Journal
Jess Bravin covers the U.S. Supreme Court for The Wall Street Journal, following earlier postings as United Nations correspondent and editor of the WSJ/California weekly. His books include The Terror Courts, an account of military trials at Guantanamo Bay, and Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme, along with contributions to Violence in America: An Encyclopedia, Crimes of War 2.0, and A Concise Introduction to Logic (2nd ed.). Mr. Bravin is a regent emeritus of the University of California, delivered the John Field Simms Sr. Memorial Lecture in Law at the University of New Mexico School of Law, and has taught at the University of California Washington Center. He served on the city Police Review Commission in Berkeley, Calif., and the UC Berkeley Police Review Board, and presently is a member of the Takoma Park, Md., Ethics Commission. He attended Harvard College and holds a law degree from UC Berkeley.
BETH BRINKMANN - Covington & Burling
Beth Brinkmann is a partner in the DC office of Covington & Burling and serves as co-chair of the firm's Appellate and Supreme Court Litigation Group. She joined the firm after serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division, where she oversaw the Division’s nationwide appellate litigation. She also has practiced for more than two decades before the Supreme Court of the United States, including as Assistant to the Solicitor General and in private practice. She argued her 25th case before the Supreme Court in 2019, and regularly argues in federal and state appellate courts across the country.
As the Civil Division’s top appellate lawyer, Ms. Brinkmann represented federal agencies and Executive Branch officials in high-profile cases across a range of subject areas, including constitutional law, regulatory challenges, intellectual property matters, FOIA, federal preemption, and national security cases. She coordinated with government trial teams on analysis of potential legal arguments at early phases of litigation, and collaborated across offices on development of appellate and Supreme Court strategy. Ms. Brinkmann also presented congressional testimony and advised senior leadership of cabinet-level departments and regulatory agencies regarding litigation risk, legislative proposals, and rule-making matters.
Previously, Ms. Brinkmann served as Assistant to the Solicitor General, briefing and arguing Supreme Court cases on behalf of the federal government. She served as Assistant Federal Public Defender, representing indigent criminal defendants, including approximately a dozen felony jury trials. Following law school, she served as a law clerk to Hon. Phyllis A. Kravitch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and to Hon. Harry A. Blackmun, Supreme Court of the United States. Ms. Brinkmann graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, A.B. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School.
AARON P. BRUHL - William & Mary Law School
Professor Bruhl teaches and writes on statutory interpretation, federal courts, and the legislative process. His scholarly publications have appeared in many of the nation's leading law journals. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2014. He has offered expert commentary for television, radio, magazines, and national wire services.
Professor Bruhl received his J.D. degree from Yale Law School. While at Yale, he served as Book Reviews Editor for the Yale Law Journal and also worked on the Yale Law & Policy Review and the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. Professor Bruhl holds a master's degree in political theory from the University of Cambridge.
After law school, Professor Bruhl clerked for Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He then worked as a litigation associate in the Washington DC office of Jenner & Block LLP. His work focused on federal appellate litigation and included cases involving election law, the First Amendment, federal Indian law, and copyright infringement over online peer-to-peer file-sharing services. He is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and New York.
Before joining the William & Mary faculty in 2015, Professor Bruhl taught at the University of Houston Law Center and served as a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He was a recipient of the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence in 2017 and was honored by the graduating class of 2020 with the Walter L. Williams Jr. Teaching Award.
ERWIN CHEMERINSKY - UC Berkley School of Law
Erwin Chemerinsky became the 13th Dean of Berkeley Law on July 1, 2017, when he joined the faculty as the Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor 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 University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. 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.
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 (2021) and The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State (with Howard Gillman) (2020). He also is the author of more than 250 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.
KATHERINE MIMS CROCKER - William & Mary Law School
Professor Crocker joined the faculty of William & Mary Law School in 2019. Her scholarship concentrates on federal courts, civil-rights litigation, and structural constitutional law, and she has a special interest in areas where those fields intersect with state and local-government law and property law. Professor Crocker has published scholarship in the Duke Law Journal, the Florida Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Virginia Law Review. Her work has been cited in an opinion from the Supreme Court of the United States dissenting from the denial of certiorari, as well as in majority opinions from other courts.
At William & Mary, Professor Crocker teaches Federal Courts, State and Local Government Law, and Property Law, and at Duke University School of Law, she co-taught a course on judicial decisionmaking. Before coming to William & Mary, Professor Crocker was an Olin-Smith Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate at Duke. She also practiced law at McGuireWoods LLP in Richmond, Virginia, where she focused on appellate litigation and dispositive motions. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States and for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Professor Crocker received her law degree from the University of Virginia, where she graduated first in her class and served as an Articles Development Editor of the Virginia Law Review. She earned her undergraduate degree cum laude from Harvard University.
Professor Crocker is a member of the Virginia State Bar and the Virginia Bar Association. She is also a member of the John Marshall Inn of Court and a recipient of the Temple Bar Scholarship from the American Inns of Court Foundation.
NEAL E. DEVINS - William & Mary Law School
Neal Devins is the Sandra Day O’Connor Professor of Law and Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of several books and more than 100 articles and book chapters on courts, constitutional law, and law & politics. His books include The Company They Keep (Oxford 2019) (with Larry Baum), The Democratic Constitution (Oxford 2d ed. 2015) (with Louis Fisher), Political Dynamics of Constitutional Law (West 6th ed. 2019) (with Louis Fisher), and Shaping Constitutional Values: The Supreme Court, Elected Government, and the Abortion Dispute (Johns Hopkins University Press 1996).
His articles have appeared in The Yale Law Journal, The Stanford Law Review, The Columbia Law Review, The Michigan Law Review, The California Law Review, The Virginia Law Review, The University of Pennsylvania Law Review, The University of Chicago Law Review, The New York University Law Review, and several other journals and magazines. Professor Devins is also the author of op-eds appearing in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, and several other newspapers. He has testified before House and Senate committees on budget reform and the separation of powers. Professor Devins is a graduate of Georgetown University (A.B. 1978) and Vanderbilt Law School (J.D. 1982).
JEFFREY FISHER - Stanford Law School
Jeffrey Fisher is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. He has argued over 40 cases in the Supreme Court, on issues ranging from criminal procedure to maritime law to civil and human rights. He also has published academic articles on various constitutional issues and is a frequent commentator on the Court.
Professor Fisher’s successes include the landmark cases of Crawford v. Washington and Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, in which he persuaded the Court to adopt a new approach to the Constitution’s Confrontation Clause; Riley v. California, in which the Court for the first time applied the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches to digital information on smart phones; Blakely v. Washington, in which the Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial applies to sentencing guidelines; and Kennedy v. Louisiana, in which the Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits states from imposing capital punishment for crimes against individuals that do not result in death. Professor Fisher was also co-counsel for the plaintiffs in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees same-sex couples a right to marry.
In addition to his work at Stanford, Professor Fisher is also special counsel at O'Melveny & Myers. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Mr. Fisher earned his B.A. from Duke University and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.
IRVING GORNSTEIN - Supreme Court Institute, Georgetown Law Center
Professor Gornstein is the Executive Director of the Supreme Court Institute and a Professor from Practice at Georgetown Law Center. Professor Gornstein teaches Criminal Justice and Federal Courts, and he also co-teaches a Civil Rights seminar with Judge Srinivasan and a Current Issues seminar with Judge Pillard, both of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Professor Gornstein previously worked as an Assistant to the Solicitor General for many years, and he returned to the Solicitor General's Office as the Acting Principal Deputy for the last six months of the Obama administration. During his two stints at the Solicitor General's Office, Professor Gornstein argued 38 cases in the Supreme Court. Before that, Professor Gornstein worked in the Appellate Section of the Civil Rights Division.
REBECCA GREEN - William & Mary Law School
Rebecca Green is an Associate Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School where she teaches courses in Election Law, Redistricting & GIS, Privacy Law, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.
Professor Green co-directs the Election Law Program, a joint project of the Law School and the National Center for State Courts that provides resources for judges on election law topics. In 2013, Professor Green co-founded Revive My Vote to assist Virginians with prior felony convictions regain the right to vote. In 2018, Professor Green joined the National Task Force on Election Crises, a cross-partisan group convened to prevent and mitigate a range of election crises. In 2020, Green helped students co-found the Alliance of Students at the Polls (ASAP), a group mobilizing a national network of law students to work towards greater participation in and public confidence in U.S. election administration.
Professor Green’s research interests focus on the intersection of privacy law and elections, most recently in scholarship on Election Observation, Election Surveillance, and Redistricting Transparency.
Professor Green earned her B.A. in Political Science from Connecticut College, an MA in Chinese Legal History from Harvard University, and is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School.
The class of 2016 selected Professor Green to receive the Walter Williams Jr. Memorial Teaching Award awarded annually to one professor by the graduating class. Since January 2021, Professor Green has served as one of three University Ombuds at the College of William & Mary assisting faculty and staff with workplace conflict resolution.
PAMELA HARRIS - U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit
Pamela Harris is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, appointed in 2014 by President Obama. Previously, Harris worked in private practice as a Supreme Court and appellate litigator with the firm of O’Melveny & Myers. She served twice at the U.S. Department of Justice, as principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Policy from 2010 to 2012, and as an attorney-advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel from 1993 to 1996.
Judge Harris also taught constitutional law and criminal procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Georgetown Law Center, served as executive director of Georgetown Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute, and was a co-director of Harvard Law School’s Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Clinic. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, she served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Harry T. Edwards of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
TOBY J. HEYTENS - U.S. Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit
Judge Heytens was confirmed to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 after his appointment by President Joe Biden. In his prior role as Virginia Solicitor General, Heytens successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court twice and represented the Commonwealth on numerous other matters in the Supreme Court of Virginia and federal circuit courts. In 2019, he and his colleagues won the National Association of Attorneys General’s Supreme Court Best Brief Award for the brief filed in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill.
Judge Heytens served in the Office of the U.S. Solicitor General, during which time he argued six cases before the Supreme Court. At the University of Virginia Law School, he served as one of the directors of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. He is an expert in civil procedure, constitutional torts, criminal procedure, and remedies. Before joining the UVA Law faculty, Heytens After graduating from UVA law school, he clerked for then-Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, served as a Bristow Fellow in the Solicitor General’s Office, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and worked in the law firm O’Melveny & Myers’ Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group in Washington, D.C.
MARGARET HU - William & Mary Law School
Professor Margaret Hu is a Professor of Law and Director of the Digital Democracy Lab. She is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State University. Her research interests include the intersection of immigration policy, national security, cybersurveillance, and civil rights. She has published several works on dataveillance and cybersurveillance, including, Biometric ID Cybersurveillance; Big Data Blacklisting; Taxonomy of the Snowden Disclosures; Biometric Cyberintelligence and the Posse Comitatus Act; and Algorithmic Jim Crow. She is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum, a non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C., that promotes responsible data privacy policies. Previously, she served as special policy counsel in the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Discrimination in the Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice. Hu holds a B.A. from the University of Kansas and a J.D. from Duke Law School. She clerked for Judge Rosemary Barkett on U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and subsequently joined the U.S. Department of Justice through the Attorney General’s Honors Program.
WILLIAM "WILLY" M. JAY - Goodwin Procter LLP
Willy Jay leads Goodwin’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation practice. He currently serves as co-chair of Goodwin’s Washington, D.C. office. Mr. Jay uses his deep experience litigating before the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals to help clients formulate winning appellate strategy. His appellate skill led Benchmark Litigation to name him the nationwide Appellate Lawyer of the Year for 2020. A former Assistant to the Solicitor General and Supreme Court clerk, he has argued 17 cases before the Supreme Court, briefed more than 50 Supreme Court cases on the merits, and briefed more than 150 cases at the certiorari stage. In recent years he argued five of the most significant intellectual-property cases at the Court, involving patent, copyright, and trademark law.
Jay has handled cases in every federal court of appeals as well. He has filed more than 200 briefs in federal and state appeals courts and argued in 11 federal circuits. He has notable expertise in the Federal Circuit, where he has argued 22 times, filed more than 75 briefs in patent appeals and been recognized as “Appellate Litigator of the Year" by Managing IP. Mr. Jay also regularly counsels clients on appellate strategy at the trial level, preparing and arguing key motions and post-trial briefing before district courts and federal and state administrative agencies.
Willy is recognized in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business, where clients praise him for being “‘a rocket scientist’ whose ‘spectacular brief writing’ and ‘keen and analytical mind’ mark him out as a ‘rising star’ at the appellate bar.” Mr. Jay is also listed in Legal500 and Best Lawyers in America. Law360 named him an “Appellate MVP.” He has been named “Litigator of the Week” by the AmLaw Litigation Daily and a “Rising Star” by both the National Law Journal and Law360.
Jay has particular experience in appellate cases involving intellectual property (including patent, copyright, and trademark law), financial services, administrative law (with a particular focus on pharmaceutical regulation), environmental law, class action practice, federal preemption of state law, and the First Amendment (including campaign finance regulation, election law, and election crimes).
PAMELA KARLAN - Stanford Law School
Pamela Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and Co-Director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. She has argued nine cases at the Court, most recently representing the employees in the consolidated case Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that Title VII protects LGBT workers. From February 2021 to July 2022, she served in the Department of Justice as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division, where, among other things, she oversaw the Division’s appellate and voting right work. During her prior time in the Division, she received the Attorney General’s Award for Exceptional Service—the department’s highest award for employee performance—as part of the team responsible for implementing the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor.
Professor Karlan has also served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and as an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998, she taught at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Professor Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation, and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and the American Law Institute.
ALLISON ORR LARSEN - William & Mary Law School
Allison Orr Larsen is the Alfred Wilson & Mary I.E. Lee Professor of Law at William & Mary where she also directs the Institute for the Bill of Rights Law. Professor Larsen teaches courses in constitutional law, administrative law, and statutory interpretation. Since joining the William & Mary law faculty in 2010, Larsen has received many awards honoring her teaching and scholarship including: the university’s Alumni Fellowship Award, the Walter L. Williams Jr. Memorial Teaching Award, two university-wide Plumeri Awards, the inaugural McGlothlin Teaching Award and the state-wide Outstanding Faculty Award in the “Rising Star” category (the latter is Virginia’s highest faculty honor, awarded by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia).
Professor Larsen is a scholar of constitutional law and legal institutions, with a focus on how information dynamics affect both. Her work on fact-finding at the Supreme Court has been featured multiple times in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and was also the subject of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2021. Larsen has published in the nation’s top law reviews, and her work has been cited by four different U.S. Courts of Appeals. She appeared with Stephen Colbert as a guest on The Colbert Report (Comedy Central) to discuss her scholarship on Supreme Court amicus briefs, a subject on which she also testified before the Presidential Commission on Supreme Court Reform.
Professor Larsen received her B.A. from William & Mary in 1999 and her law degree in 2004 from the University of Virginia where she graduated first in her class. After law school, Professor Larsen clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to joining the William & Mary faculty, Professor Larsen was an associate in the appellate practice group at O’Melveny and Myers in Washington DC.
Professor Larsen spent the fall of 2016 as a visiting scholar at Oxford University and the fall of 2018 as the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.
ADAM LIPTAK - New York Times
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times’s news staff in 2002. In 2007, he began writing “Sidebar,” a column on legal affairs. In 2008, he became the paper’s Supreme Court correspondent.
Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught courses on the Supreme Court and the First Amendment at the University of Chicago Law School, New York University School of Law, and Yale Law School.
ROMAN MARTINEZ - Latham & Watkins LLP
Roman Martinez is the Deputy Office Managing Partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins. As a member of the firm’s Supreme Court & Appellate Practice, he focuses primarily on appeals in the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Courts of Appeals, and state appellate courts. In 2016, he rejoined Latham after serving as an Assistant to the Solicitor General at the US Department of Justice. Mr. Martinez has personally argued 11 cases in the Supreme Court, including important cases in the fields of the First Amendment, arbitration, patent law, criminal law, civil rights, employment, and civil and criminal procedure.
In the 2021 Term, Mr. Martinez argued and prevailed in ZF Automotive v. Luxshare, in which the court clarified that U.S. courts lack authority to grant discovery for use in private commercial arbitrations conducted abroad, and Vega v. Tekoh, in which the Court clarified the scope of civil liability for violations of Miranda v. Arizona. In the 2020 Term, he was part of teams successfully representing Facebook and the Government of Guam in unanimous Supreme Court victories under the TCPA and Comprehensive Environmental, Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) statutes. In the 2022 Term, he represents the petitioner in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, involving the contours of the fair-use defense to copyright infringement.
Before joining Latham, Mr. Martinez served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts of the Supreme Court of the United States and to then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit. From 2002 to 2005, Mr. Martinez served as an advisor on the Iraqi political and constitutional process, in various roles at the White House, at the US Embassy and Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and at the US Department of Defense. He received the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terrorism and the US Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award for his service in Iraq.
LUKE McCLOUD - Williams & Connolly LLP
Luke McCloud is a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP. Mr. McCloud's practice focuses on complex civil matters, with an emphasis on patent litigation. He is also an experienced appellate litigator, having argued or briefed dozens of high-stakes appeals throughout the federal system, including at the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. McCloud has been recognized by The Legal 500 as a Rising Star—General Commercial Disputes (2020 and 2021) and by Managing IP as a Rising Star (2020).
A native of eastern Kentucky, he earned a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a JD from Harvard Law School, where Mr. McCloud was Vice President & Treasurer of the Harvard Law Review and a finalist in the Ames Moot Court Competition. At Williams & Connolly, he serves as a member of the firm’s Hiring and Pro Bono Committees and was previously a member of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee. In the October Term 2014, Mr. McCloud served as a law clerk to Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor on the United States Supreme Court. He previously clerked for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Mr. McCloud maintains an active pro bono practice focusing on veterans’ causes, landlord-tenant matters, and education initiatives.
ERIN E. MURPHY - Clement & Murphy PLLC
Erin Murphy is a founding partner of Clement & Murphy PLLC. She is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading Supreme Court and appellate advocates. She has argued dozens of cases in appellate and trial courts throughout the country, including the Supreme Court and nearly all of the federal courts of appeals. Erin is one of only seven women in the top two bands of Chambers & Partners rankings for Appellate Law–Nationwide, and the National Law Journal has named her one of the nation’s “Outstanding Women Lawyers.” Erin has litigated appeals involving myriad provisions of the Constitution, including several cases involving the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty. She has litigated a wide range of statutory issues as well, including cases involving the Affordable Care Act, the Bankruptcy Code, the False Claims Act, the Federal Arbitration Act, the Federal Power Act, the Natural Gas Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and more. The National Law Journal named Erin a “Litigation Trailblazer” for her work representing institutional clients, which includes successfully arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Wisconsin State Legislature. Erin also has an active pro bono practice, through which she has successfully represented many religious organizations and adherents, criminal defendants, asylum applicants, adoptive parents, and more.
Erin is an adjunct professor at her alma mater the Georgetown University Law Center, a former officer of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, and a frequent speaker on topics relating to the Supreme Court and appellate advocacy. In her spare time, Erin serves on the boards of directors of Street Law and the Mother of Light Center.
MELISSA MURRAY - New York University School of Law
Melissa Murray is a leading expert in family law, constitutional law, and reproductive rights and justice. Her award-winning research has appeared in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is an author of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice, the first casebook to cover the field of reproductive rights and justice, and a co-editor of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories.
Murray has written for popular publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Nation, and has offered commentary for numerous media outlets, including NPR, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and PBS. She is also a co-host of Strict Scrutiny, a podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.
Murray is an honors graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. She is a member of the New York bar and the American Law Institute.
Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Murray was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as the interim dean of Berkeley Law.
JANAI NELSON - NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Janai S. Nelson is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). Nelson formerly served as Associate Director-Counsel and as a member of LDF’s litigation and policy teams. She has also served as interim director of LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute and in various other leadership capacities at LDF. Nelson was one of the lead counsel in Veasey v. Abbott (2018), a successful federal challenge to Texas’s voter ID law, and the lead architect of NUL v. Trump (2020), which sought to declare President Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion training in the workplace unconstitutional before it was later rescinded. Prior to joining LDF in June 2014, Nelson was Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship and Associate Director of the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development at St. John’s University School of Law where she was also a full professor of law and served on the law school’s Senior Leadership Team.
A renowned scholar of voting rights and election law, Nelson continues to produce cutting-edge scholarship on domestic and comparative election law, race, and democratic theory. Nelson’s publication, Parsing Partisanship: An Approach to Partisan Gerrymandering and Race, appeared in NYU Law Review (October 2021), and proposes an option for the Supreme Court to address hybrid racial and partisan gerrymandering claims despite its finding that partisan gerrymandering is nonjusticiable. She also published Counting Change: Ensuring an Inclusive Census for Communities of Color, 119 Colum. L. Rev. (2019), which advances a theory of representational equality in which all U.S. residents “are to be counted — and served — as constituents” and that centers the Census and the accurate count of the country’s most vulnerable populations in the functioning of our democracy. Her other two seminal scholarly publications are The Causal Context of Disparate Vote Denial, 54 B.C. L. Rev. 579 (2013), which examines Section 2 of Voting Rights Act as a disparate impact standard and the racial dimensions of modern vote denial, and The First Amendment, Equal Protection, and Felon Disfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, 64 Fl. L. Rev. 111 (2013), which explores the intersection of the First Amendment and the equal protection clause in reconsidering the constitutionality of felon disfranchisement in the United States.
Prior to entering academia, Nelson was a Fulbright Scholar at the Legal Resources Center in Accra, Ghana, where she researched the political disfranchisement of persons with criminal convictions and the advancement of democracy in Ghana. Her research as a Fulbright Scholar is the basis of a publication entitled, Fair Measure of the Right to Vote: A Comparative Perspective of Voting Rights Enforcement in a Maturing Democracy,18 Cardozo J. Comp. & Int’l 425 (2010). Prior to receiving the Fulbright award, Nelson was the Director of LDF’s Political Participation Group where she oversaw all voting-related litigation and matters, litigated voting rights and redistricting cases, and worked on criminal justice issues on behalf of African Americans and other under-served communities. While at LDF, she argued en banc before the Second Circuit and served as lead counsel in Hayden v. Pataki, a felon disfranchisement case that challenged New York State laws that deny the right to vote to people who are incarcerated and on parole for a felony conviction. She was also part of the team of civil rights attorneys representing African- and Haitian-American voters in NAACP v. Hood (a class action suit that arose out of the 2000 general elections) and one of the counsel representing a death row inmate whose sentence was commuted in 2003 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Banks v. Dretke.
Nelson received a B.A. from New York University and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law where she served as Articles Editor of the UCLA Law Review, Consulting Editor of the National Black Law Journal, and Associate Editor of the UCLA Women’s Law Journal. Upon graduating from law school, Nelson clerked for the Honorable Theodore McMillian on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (1997-1998) and the Honorable David H. Coar on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (1996-1997). She has been published in popular news outlets and platforms, including The Guardian, L.A. Times, Reuters, Huffington Post, and Blavity. Nelson has also appeared on nearly every major broadcast news outlet, including CNN, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, as well as local, alternative, and social media platforms. Nelson regularly speaks as a civil rights, constitutional law, and election law expert at conferences and symposia nationwide.
KEVIN NEWSOM - U.S. Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit
Judge Newsom is a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He sits in Birmingham, Alabama. Before his appointment to the bench, Judge Newsom was the head of the appellate practice group at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP and, before that, the Solicitor General of Alabama. As a practicing lawyer, Judge Newsom argued four cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, and nearly 40 more in the United States Courts of Appeals and state supreme and appellate courts.
Judge Newsom graduated summa cum laude from Samford University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an articles editor on the Harvard Law Review. Following law school, Judge Newsom clerked for Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice David H. Souter of the Supreme Court of the United States.
CARTER G. PHILLIPS - Sidley Austin LLP
Carter has been recognized as one of the most experienced Supreme Court and appellate lawyers in the country. Since joining Sidley, Carter has argued 79 cases before the Supreme Court, more than any other lawyer in private practice. Prior to joining Sidley, Carter served as an Assistant to the Solicitor General and in that position he argued nine cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the United States Government. He thus currently has a total of 88 oral arguments before the Supreme Court and more than 145 arguments before the United States Courts of Appeals. He has argued in every Circuit and has argued 40 cases before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He has been a co-director of Northwestern University School of Law’s Supreme Court clinic and an adjunct professor at the Law School for more than 15 years. At the outset of his career, Carter clerked for Judge Robert Sprecher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and for Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on the United States Supreme Court.
Carter’s advocacy on behalf of clients has earned him acknowledgment in numerous publications. An academic study of Supreme Court briefs from 1946 to 2013 found Carter to be one of the most successful lawyers to argue in front of the Supreme Court. The analysis, “Who Wins in the Supreme Court? An Examination of Attorney and Law Firm Influence,” led the author to conclude that “not only is Phillips a seasoned Supreme Court litigator, but he is also one of the most successful Supreme Court brief-writers.”
In recognition of Carter’s litigation success, he has been ranked among the nation’s top lawyers by Chambers USA, The Legal 500 United States, Benchmark Litigation, The Best Lawyers in America, Who’s Who Legal, and The National Law Journal. He consistently is recognized by Chambers USA as being in the nation’s top tier of appellate lawyers and regularly receives the directory’s highest level “Star” ranking.
Carter’s practice has been featured in articles in Forbes, The American Lawyer, Business Week, Legal Times, The National Law Journal, USA Today, and Legal Business. He frequently speaks at conferences, law schools, and before industry groups regarding his experience before the Supreme Court.
ANDREW PINCUS - Mayer Brown
Andrew Pincus focuses his appellate practice on briefing and arguing cases in the Supreme Court of the United States and in federal and state appellate courts; developing legal strategy for trial courts; and presenting policy and legal arguments to Congress, state legislatures, and regulatory agencies. Mr. Pincus has argued 30 cases in the Supreme Court. Law360 ranked his victory in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2011), as the most important Supreme Court class action decision of the last 15 years.
A former Assistant to the Solicitor General in the United States Department of Justice (1984-1988), Mr. Pincus co-founded and serves as co-director of the Yale Law School's Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic (2006-present), which provides pro bono representation in 10-15 Supreme Court cases each year. His practice also includes detailed written and oral advocacy before Congress, other legislative bodies, and regulatory agencies regarding a variety of policy and legal issues. He frequently testifies before Congress on a variety of subjects, including patent reform, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, reform of the federal litigation system, and the Supreme Court's decisions in cases involving business law issues. Mr. Pincus successfully represented clients in connection with passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Reporters often turn to Mr. Pincus for commentary on Supreme Court cases. He also frequently speaks and writes on legal issues for academic, professional, and general audiences.
While serving as General Counsel of the United States Department of Commerce (1997-2000), Mr. Pincus had principal responsibility for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act. He also participated in formulation of policy concerning intellectual property protection, privacy, domain name management, taxation of electronic commerce, export controls, international trade, and consumer protection. Before rejoining Mayer Brown, Mr. Pincus served as General Counsel of Andersen Worldwide S.C. Following law school graduation, Andy was Law Clerk to the Honorable Harold H. Greene, United States District Court for the District of Columbia (1981-1982), after which he practiced with another major law firm in Washington.
MORGAN RATNER - Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Morgan Ratner is special counsel in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Litigation Group and is a member of the Firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Practice.
Prior to joining the Firm, Ms. Ratner served in the Office of the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice. During her tenure there, she argued eight Supreme Court cases involving areas of federal law such as securities regulation, bankruptcy, employment, intellectual property, criminal law, and elections law. Her recent arguments include Minerva Surgical, Inc. v. Hologic, Inc. (patent validity) and Emulex Corp. v. Varjabedian (private Section 14(e) suits). While at the Solicitor General’s Office, Ms. Ratner also filed over 150 Supreme Court briefs at the merits and certiorari stages. She received a John Marshall Award, the Department of Justice’s highest award offered to attorneys, for exceptional service to the Office of the Solicitor General and to the Department of Justice.
In private practice, Ms. Ratner regularly briefs and argues appeals and dispositive motions; provides strategic guidance for trial and administrative proceedings; and counsels clients confronting high-stakes legal issues.
After graduating Harvard Law School—where she was awarded the Fay Diploma as the top student in her class—Ms. Ratner clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court and then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She is a member of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court and is a volunteer with Street Law, Inc.
BERTRALL ROSS - University of Virginia Law School
Bertrall Ross joined the law faculty in 2021. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, constitutional theory, election law, administrative law and statutory interpretation.
Ross’ research is driven by a concern about democratic responsiveness and accountability, as well as the inclusion of marginalized communities in administrative and political processes. His past scholarship has been published in several books and journals, including the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. Two of his articles were selected by the Yale/Harvard/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum.
Prior to joining the Virginia faculty, Ross taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he received the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also been awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the Princeton University Law and Public Affairs Fellowship, the Columbia Law School Kellis Parker Academic Fellowship and the Marshall Scholarship. Ross is currently serving on the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.
Ross earned his undergraduate degree in international affairs and history from the University of Colorado, Boulder; his graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs; and his law degree from Yale Law School. After law school, he clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.
DAVID SAVAGE - Los Angeles Times
Mr. Savage has written about the Supreme Court for the Los Angeles Times since 1986 and has covered the confirmations of all the current justices. Prior to that, he was an education writer for the paper in Los Angeles. He is the author of Turning Right: the Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court (1992) and of the revised two-volume Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court published by the CQ Press. He has degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern University.
PRATIK A. SHAH - Akin Gump
Mr. Shah is head of Akin Gump’s Supreme Court and Appellate practice. He has argued 16 cases before the United States Supreme Court and dozens more in other appellate courts across the country, including in every circuit. Named a “litigation trailblazer” (National Law Journal), Mr. Shah has been recognized for “practicing before the highest court in the land on some of the most groundbreaking cases of the 21st century” (Washington Business Journal) and described as “the complete package: an extremely gifted writer and an extremely effective oral advocate” (Chambers USA).
Before joining Akin Gump, Mr. Shah served for more than five years as an Assistant to the Solicitor General at the Department of Justice. He received a number of awards for his advocacy before the Supreme Court during that time, including the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award for his role as lead drafter of the successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor.
Prior to his work in the Solicitor General’s office, Mr. Shah worked in the appellate practice of another international law firm, taught constitutional law, and clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge William A. Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He graduated summa cum laude with a B.S.E. from Princeton University and with a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
PAUL SMITH - Georgetown Law School and Campaign Legal Center
Professor Smith has four decades of experience litigating a wide range of cases. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court 21 times and secured numerous victories, including in important cases advancing civil liberties. Two examples are Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark gay rights case, and Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass’n, which established First Amendment rights of those who produce and sell video games.
In addition, Paul has argued a number of important voting rights cases at the Supreme Court, including Gill v. Whitford and Vieth v. Jubelirer, involving partisan gerrymandering, LULAC v. Perry, involving the legality of Texas’s mid-decade redrawing of congressional districts, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board¸ involving the constitutionality of a voter identification law, and Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, involving a constitutional challenge to Arizona’s legislative map.
Paul previously served as a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block, where he was chair of the firm's Appellate and Supreme Court Practice and co-chair of the firm's Election Law and Redistricting Practice. He is now a Professor from Practice at Georgetown University Law Center and the VP for Litigation and Strategy at the Campaign Legal Center.
Paul graduated from Amherst College and Yale Law School, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. In 2010, he was given the Thurgood Marshall Award by the ABA Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice for his work promoting civil rights and civil liberties.
JAMES Y. STERN - William & Mary Law School
James Y. Stern joined the William & Mary faculty in 2013. His scholarship centers on property, private law theory, intellectual property, privacy, and related issues. His articles have been published in leading legal journals including the California Law Review, the Harvard Law Review, and the Michigan Law Review, and have been cited by various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
At William & Mary, he has taught Intellectual Property, Property, and Torts, as well as advanced seminars and reading groups on topics such as cryptocurrency law and policy and music licensing. He is a recipient of the Thomas Edison Innovation Fellowship from the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property and the Temple Bar Scholarship from the American Inns of Court Foundation, as well as the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Rockefeller Award for the Advancement of Scholarship and the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence at William & Mary.
Professor Stern previously served as Deputy General Counsel at the United States Department of the Treasury. In that capacity, he oversaw major Treasury Department litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts, worked on national security issues including international sanctions programs and review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), helped spearhead the development of cryptocurrency regulations and related measures involving oversight of financial institutions, and was involved in a wide range of domestic and international tax policy matters. In addition, he played a major role in the establishment of various Treasury Department programs implemented in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, totaling more than one trillion dollars. In recognition of his efforts, he was awarded the Treasury Department’s Distinguished Service Award by the Secretary of the Treasury.
Professor Stern received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia, where he was elected to the order of the Coif and was awarded the Traynor Prize for the best paper by a graduating student. He subsequently clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Stern has participated in litigation involving intellectual property and other matters in various capacities. He is a member of the Virginia and Washington, D.C., bars, as well as an honorary member of London’s Commercial Bar Association.
MARTINA STEWART - USA Today
Martina Stewart is a senior editor in USA TODAY’s Washington, D.C. bureau responsible for Supreme Court coverage and USAT’s fact-checking team. She’s been on the SCOTUS beat since the fall of 2019. Journalism is a second career for Stewart. She graduated from Yale in 1994 and from Harvard Law School in 1997. Stewart practiced law for nearly a decade before returning to school and getting a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia in 2007. As a young lawyer, she clerked on the federal district court in the Central District of California and for the Honorable Judith W. Rogers of the D.C. Circuit during the 2000-2001 term of the court. As a journalist, Stewart’s focus has always been on national politics/D.C. coverage often produced on digital platforms and often in breaking news settings. She previously worked at CNN, the Washington Post, and NPR.
GREG STOHR - Bloomberg
Greg Stohr has been the Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter for over 20 years. He won the New York Press Club spot news award for his coverage of the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers breaking news award for the Court’s 2012 Obamacare decision. In 2004, he published a book on the University of Michigan affirmative action cases titled A Black and White Case: How Affirmative Action Survived its Greatest Legal Challenge.
Stohr has taught a course on Constitutional Law and the Supreme Court at the George Washington University School of Law. After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 1995, he clerked for Judge Frank A. Kaufman of the District of Maryland.
MEAGHAN VERGOW - O'Melveny & Myers
Meaghan VerGow is a partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where she is a member of the firm’s Financial Services and Appellate Practices. Meaghan has briefed and argued cases in trial and appellate courts across the country, and has secured multiple unanimous Supreme Court victories. She maintains an active pro bono practice concentrating on First Amendment and criminal justice matters, and in 2020 she received the ABA Death Penalty Representation Project’s John Paul Stevens Guiding Hand of Counsel Award.
Meaghan clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court. Meaghan received her B.A. from Columbia University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as an Articles Editor for the Harvard Law Review.
JEFF WALL - Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Jeff Wall is a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Litigation Group and the head of its Supreme Court and Appellate Practice. Mr. Wall is the former Acting Solicitor General of the United States. He has argued 30 cases in the Supreme Court in a number of areas, including securities, class actions, arbitration, intellectual property, taxation, labor and employment, bankruptcy, preemption, the False Claims Act, the First Amendment, and criminal law and procedure. Mr. Wall has briefed and argued numerous cases before federal and state courts of appeals and administrative agencies. In addition to his appellate experience, Mr. Wall has represented clients in a range of complex civil and criminal matters at the trial level, including as lead counsel in a successful federal criminal trial.
Before rejoining Sullivan & Cromwell, Mr. Wall served in the Office of the Solicitor General as the Principal Deputy for four years, twice leading the office as the Acting Solicitor General from March to September 2017 and again from July 2020 to January 2021. In that role, he was responsible for overseeing appellate litigation by the United States in the Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, which required coordinating with and counseling agencies throughout the federal government on their regulatory objectives. He successfully argued several major Supreme Court cases on the separation of powers, constitutional rights, executive authority, and religious liberty. Mr. Wall also served as an Assistant to the Solicitor General from 2008 to 2013.
Following law school, Mr. Wall clerked for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He has taught courses in law school on administrative law and federal jurisdiction. He is a member and former officer of the Edward Coke Appellate Inn of Court, a member of the Supreme Court Historical Society, and a former member of the Advisory Committee on Procedures for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
TIMOTHY ZICK - William & Mary Law School
Professor Zick graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University and summa cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where he received the Francis E. Lucey, S.J. Award for graduating first in his class. While at Georgetown, Professor Zick was a Notes and Comments editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. Following law school, Professor Zick was an associate with the law firms of Williams and Connolly in Washington, D.C., where he assisted in the defense of congressional term limits in the Supreme Court of the United States, and Foley Hoag in Boston. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable Levin H. Campbell of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Professor Zick also served as a Trial Attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the United States Department of Justice, where he defended the constitutionality and legality of a variety of federal programs and statutes.
In 2022, Professor Zick received the McGlothlin Award for Exceptional Teaching. He has received the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence three times: in 2011, 2013 and 2017. He has also received numerous research professorships, including the William H. Cabell professorship.
Professor Zick has written on a variety of constitutional issues, with a special focus on the First Amendment. He is the author of five university press books on the subject: Speech out of Doors: Preserving First Amendment Liberties in Public Places (Cambridge U. Press 2009); The Cosmopolitan First Amendment: Protecting Transborder Expressive and Religious Liberties (Cambridge U. Press 2013); The Dynamic Free Speech Clause: Free Speech and its Relation to Other Constitutional Rights (Oxford U. Press 2018); The First Amendment in the Trump Era (Oxford U. Press 2019); and Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is also the co-author of a First Amendment casebook, The First Amendment: Cases and Theory (Wolters Kluwer 4th ed. 2022).
Professor Zick has been a frequent commentator in local, national, and international media regarding First Amendment, Second Amendment, and other constitutional issues. He has been a guest on national television and radio broadcasts, including All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the Michael Smerconish Program on SiriusXM. Professor Zick’s commentary has been published in The Atlantic, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Monthly, Jurist, and The Conversation. He has been quoted frequently in the national press, including in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, FiveThirtyEight, Politifact, CNN, NBC, Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, and the Christian Science Monitor.
Professor Zick testified before Congress on the Occupy Wall Street protests and rights of free speech, assembly, and petition.