Honored Guests and Speakers
- Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
The Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Honorable John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the United States, was born in Buffalo, New York, January 27, 1955. He married Jane Sullivan in 1996 and they have two children – Josephine and Jack. He received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1976 and a Juris Doctorate. from Harvard Law School in 1979.
He served as a law clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1979–1980, and as a law clerk for then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1980 Term. He served as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States from 1981–1982, Associate Counsel to President Ronald Reagan, White House Counsel’s Office from 1982–1986, and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General from 1989–1993. From 1986–1989 and 1993–2003, he practiced law in Washington, D.C. He served as a Judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2003-2005.
Nominated as Chief Justice of the United States by President George W. Bush, he assumed that office on September 29, 2005.
- Rob Addy
Sundeep K. (Rob) Addy has represented plaintiffs and defendants in dozens of multi-million and billion-dollar cases across the country. He has significant trial and pretrial experience in all types of large, complex cases, with a particular emphasis on patent and antitrust work. Past clients include Fortune 50 companies, small businesses, local technology startups, private equity firms, and major pharmaceutical manufacturers. Mr. Addy has litigated before eighteen different federal district courts, three federal appeals courts, five state courts, and the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. A former journalist who helped produce Emmy-award winning documentaries for PBS, Mr. Addy’s focus as a litigator is finding creative ways to convey complex stories to judges and juries.
From 2020 through 2021, Mr. Addy served as a Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of Colorado, where he was a member of the team that conducted a patterns and practices investigation into the Aurora Police Department and Aurora Fire Rescue. The Aurora investigation was the first of its kind in Colorado and it documented a consistent pattern of racially discriminatory law enforcement practices, which led to the imposition of a five-year consent decree between the City of Aurora and the State of Colorado.
Mr. Addy is a former law clerk for Circuit Judge David M. Ebel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, as well as Justice Paul W. Green of the Texas Supreme Court.Mr. Addy graduated with high honors from the University of Texas School of Law in 2004, where he was a member of the editorial board of the Texas Law Review.
- Professor Samuel L. Bray
Samuel L. Bray has been a member of the Notre Dame Law School faculty since 2018. His primary areas of research are remedies and equity, and his recent publications include “Debs and Federal Equity Jurisdiction,” 97 Notre Dame Law Review (forthcoming 2022) (with Aditya Bamzai); “Getting into Equity,” 98 Notre Dame Law Review 1763 (2022) (with Paul B. Miller); “Equity, Law, and the Seventh Amendment,” 100 Texas Law Review 467-517 (2022); and “The Mischief Rule,” 109 Georgetown Law Journal 967 (2021); as well as chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Christianity and the Law (forthcoming 2022) and the Oxford Handbook of New Private Law (2021). Professor Bray is an adviser on the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies, and he has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, and he clerked for then-Judge Michael W. McConnell on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. From 2011 to 2018, Professor Bray was a member of the law faculty at UCLA.
- Gregg Costa
Gregg Costa recently stepped down from the bench of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He had also served the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. After graduating from Dartmouth College, he taught elementary school in the Mississippi Delta through the Teach for America program. He then attended the University of Texas School of Law where he was Editor in Chief of the Texas Law Review. After law school, he clerked for Judge A. Raymond Randolph of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He also served as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of Solicitor General. After his time in Washington, he returned home to Texas where he was in private practice before serving as an Assistant United States Attorney. As a federal prosecutor, he focused on white collar crime, which included prosecuting Allen Stanford for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. President Barack Obama appointed him to the district court in 2012 and the court of appeals in 2014. He retired on August 5, 2022 to return to private practice.
- Professor Katherine Mims Crocker
Katherine Mims Crocker joined the faculty of William & Mary Law School in 2019. Her scholarship concentrates on federal courts, civil-rights litigation, and structural constitutional law. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming 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. Professor Crocker was previously an Olin-Smith Fellow and Postdoctoral Associate at Duke Law School. She also practiced at McGuireWoods LLP in Richmond, Virginia, where she focused on appellate litigation and dispositive motions. She clerked for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States and for Circuit 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 and her undergraduate degree from Harvard University.
- Troy A. Eid
Troy A. Eid (rhymes with “side”) co-chairs the American Indian Law Practice Group at Greenberg Traurig, LLP. He is the President of the Navajo Nation Bar Association–the largest legal services organization in the country that directly serves a Native American tribal government–and is the former United States Attorney for the District of Colorado, appointed by President George W. Bush. During the Obama Administration, Troy chaired the Indian Law and Order Commission, the advisory board to the President and Congress for strengthening public safety for all 574 federally recognized tribes.
Mr. Troy is frequently selected as a mediator to resolve disputes between Native American tribes and energy companies, and between tribes and state governments. He also represents tribes and companies in federal criminal and civil investigations. He was named the 2022 Lawyer of the Year in Colorado by Best Lawyers in America, and is ranked as one of the nation’s top 10 experts in Native America Law in the latest Chambers USA Guide. Before joining Greenberg Traurig, Mr. Troy served on the cabinet of former Governor Bill Owens, as Chief Legal Counsel to the Governor and as Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Personnel & Administration, responsible for Colorado’s 72,000-employee state workforce and civil service system.
(more…) - Colorado Supreme Court Justice Richard L. Gabriel
Honorable Richard L. Gabriel was appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court in June of 2015, after serving on the Colorado Court of Appeals from 2008 to 2015. Justice Gabriel received his bachelor of arts degree in American Studies from Yale University in 1984 and his juris doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law in 1987. Prior to his appointment to the Court of Appeals, Justice Gabriel was a long-time partner with Holme Roberts & Owen LLP (now, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner) in Denver, where his practice focused on commercial, intellectual property, probate, and products liability litigation, including appeals, and where he headed the firm’s intellectual property practice group.
Justice Gabriel has received numerous awards for his service to the community, including the Denver Bar Association’s Award of Merit (that Association’s highest award), a Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center Champions for Children award and its In the Pursuit of Justice Lifetime Achievement Award, recognition by Marquis Who’s Who as a Distinguished Humanitarian, and the Richard Marden Davis Award (given to a lawyer under the age of 40 who has combined excellence in the practice of law and creative community leadership). He is a member of the state bars of New York and Colorado, the bars of numerous federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, and the American, Colorado, New York, and Denver Bar Associations, where he has served (and continues to serve) on many committees.
Justice Gabriel is also actively involved on the board of the Colorado Judicial Institute, the executive council of the Minoru Yasui Inn of Court, and the Our Courts civics education program. He writes and speaks frequently on matters relating to the judiciary, trial and appellate practice, and professionalism. In his spare time, he plays the trumpet professionally.
- Professor Aya Gruber
Aya Gruber is the Ira C. Rothgerber Professor of Constitutional Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Colorado Law School, and an expert on criminal law, feminist legal theory, violence against women, and critical theory. She has previously taught at the University of Iowa Law School and Harvard Law School.
Professor Gruber graduated from U.C. Berkeley and Harvard Law School, after which she served as a public defender in Washington, DC, and in Miami, Florida. Her frequently cited scholarly articles combine insights from practice with extensive research to articulate a feminist and critical race critique of carceral approaches to gender violence. In 2020, Professor Gruber published her debut monograph, The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration, which PEN America called “an exciting and brave book that tackles the cause and effect between gender-based violence, mass incarceration, and a broken legal system.”
Professor Gruber’s work has been widely cited in the press, including in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and Buzzfeed. She is a member of the American Law Institute and a frequent commentator on criminal law issues, with op-eds in The New York Times, Slate, and The Denver Post, and appearances on ABC, NPR, and PBS, among others.
- Professor Todd Henderson
M. Todd Henderson is the Michael J. Marks Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Henderson’s research interests include corporations, securities regulation, and American Indian Law.
Professor Henderson is the author of dozens of books and articles, as well as two legal thrillers. He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and other media outlets. His newest book, Native Americans and the Supreme Court, will be published later this year.
Professor Henderson serves on the board of several start-up companies and leads the University of Chicago’s efforts to help solve problems of the Defense Department and intelligence agencies using entrepreneurial methods. He is a fellow of the Becker-Friedman Institute and a lecturer at the Chicago Booth School of Business. He is a founding member of Heaton Henderson LLC, a governance and securities economics consulting company.
Professor Henderson attended Princeton University and the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Honorable Dennis Jacobs of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked previously at Kirkland & Ellis and McKinsey & Company. He is married with three children.
- Robert H. Henry
Robert Harlan Henry is a former circuit judge and chief circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Before serving on the bench, he served in the Oklahoma legislature and as Attorney General of Oklahoma. After his judicial service, he was President and CEO of Oklahoma City University. He is an honorary member of the Kiowa Nation.
Mr. Henry is a co-founder and life member of the Tenth Circuit Historical Society. He is also a life member of the American Law Institute and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. He is a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He possesses four honorary doctorates, and his writings have been published by institutions from the Washington Post to scholarly presses such as the Oxford Press, University of Nebraska Press, New York University Press, and the University of Oklahoma Press.
- Professor Dalié Jiménez
Dalié Jiménez is a Professor of Law at the UC Irvine School of Law, where she teaches bankruptcy, secured transactions, contracts, and consumer financial protection courses. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Professor Jiménez has published articles in the areas of bankruptcy, student debt, and their intersection, and access to civil justice, among other topics. She is one of three principal investigators in the Financial Distress Research Project, a large-scale, longitudinal, randomized control trial, evaluating the effectiveness of legal and counseling interventions to help individuals in financial distress. Before academia, Professor Jiménez spent a year as part of the founding staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, clerked for the Honorable Juan R. Torruella, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, was a litigation associate at Ropes & Gray LLP, and worked on consumer protection issues for a Massachusetts state senator.
A cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Professor Jiménez also holds dual B.S. degrees in electrical engineering/computer science and political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Professor Nathalie Martin
Nathalie Martin is the Frederick M. Hart Chair in Consumer and Clinical Law at University of New Mexico School of Law, where she regularly teaches consumer law, bankruptcy, contracts, secured transactions, and other UCC classes. She also has taught in the Economic Justice Clinic. She has written a number of articles about payday and title loans, debt inequality and race, and many other topics. Prior to teaching, she was in private practice in Philadelphia and Boston, where she specialized in Chapter 11 reorganization. Professor Martin was the American Bankruptcy Institute Scholar in residence for the Fall of 2005. She is a member of the American Law Institute, The American College of Bankruptcy, and a former Dean of Faculty of the American Board of Certification. The endowed chair that she occupies, the Frederick M. Hart Chair in Consumer and Clinical Law, is one of the only chairs in the country dedicated to scholarly pursuits in the consumer law area.
- Professor Michael McConnell
Michael W. McConnell served as a judge of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals from 2002-2009. He is now the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His new book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution, was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His upcoming book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently a unanimous victory for the Governor of Delaware in Carney v. Adams. defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state’s courts. He served as law clerk to Associate Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is Senior Of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of the Facebook Oversight Review Board.
- Michael McGarrity
With the publication of Tularosa in 1996, Michael McGarrity turned to writing full time. Many of his novels have been national best sellers. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction in psychology and a master’s degree in clinical social work. As an undergraduate, he held a Ford Foundation Scholarship at the University of New Mexico. Additionally, he is an honor graduate of the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy.
His career in criminal justice spanned over twenty-five years and included creating treatment programs for drug offenders, supervising outreach services for at-risk juveniles, and re-establishing mental health services for the Department of Corrections after the infamous 1980 riot at the New Mexico Penitentiary. As a Santa Fe County deputy sheriff, he worked as a patrol officer, training and planning supervisor, community relations officer, and was the lead investigator of the sex crimes unit, which he established. Additionally, he taught courses at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy, served as a caseworker and investigator for the Public Defender’s District Office, and conducted investigations for a state government agency. In 1980 he was named New Mexico Social Worker of the Year and in 1987 was recognized by the American Legion as Police Officer of the Year.
(more…) - Professor Michael T. Morley
Michael T. Morley joined Florida State University College of Law in 2018. He and teaches and writes in the areas of election law, constitutional law, remedies, and the federal courts. Professor Morley’s research focuses on election emergencies, the constitutional right to vote, and the Electoral Count Act, as well as the equitable powers of the federal courts.
Professor Morley is an elected member of the American Law Institute and serves as an advisor for the ALI’s Restatement of Torts: Remedies project. Professor Morley is a member of the Florida Advisory Committee for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and was the 2021 Chair of the AALS Section on Election Law. Professor Morley’s work has been published in the Georgetown Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, and Northwestern University Law Review. The U.S. Supreme Court has cited Professor Morley’s articles, and he was counsel of record for the successful Petitioner in a landmark campaign finance case. Professor Morley has appeared on C-SPAN, Court TV, Fox News and numerous local news programs, and has been quoted in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, Politico, U.S. News and World Report, and a wide range of other national publications.
(more…) - Dr. Matt Mountain, Ph.D.
Matt Mountain is the current President of The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) – AURA is a not-for-profit consortium of 47 US Universities and 3 International affiliates which builds and operates telescopes and observatories for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA). Facilities under AURA’s management include the science operations for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the future James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). For the NSF, AURA manages the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, and the National Solar Observatory. Dr. Mountain and AURA are also responsible for the construction of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakalā, Hawaii and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on Cerro Pachon in Chile. AURA’s mission is to enable astronomical discovery and promotes broad engagement in exploring the universe. AURA has a staff of over 1,500 scientists, engineers, and administrators with an annual operating budget of approximately $350M. Dr. Mountain is the Telescope Scientist for JWST, and a member of the JWST Science Working Group. (more…)
- Henry Olsen
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.
Mr. Olsen is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes daily pieces focusing on politics, populism, foreign affairs and American conservative thought. He is also the author of The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism and The Four Faces of the Republican Party, co-authored with Dante Scala.
- District Judge Regina M. Rodriguez
Honorable Regina M. Rodriguez is the newest member of the Colorado federal district court bench. She was confirmed by the United States Senate in June 2021 and received her commission from President Joseph Biden on July 1, 2021.
Judge Rodriguez is a 1988 graduate of the University of Colorado School of Law, and she practiced as a trial attorney here in her home state of Colorado for over 30 years before joining the bench. She began her practice in a boutique litigation firm, Cooper & Kelley, where she tried many cases. She then spent 8 years at the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO) in the civil division where she ultimately became the chief of the civil division. She was the first Latina and first Asian civil chief. In 2002 she left the USAO for private practice where she spent 19 years as a partner in several national law firms: Faegre & Benson, HoganLovells, and most recently WilmerHale.
- David Savage
(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)
David Savage has covered the Supreme Court for the Los Angeles Times since 1986, the year Associate Justice Antonin Scalia joined the Court and William Rehnquist was elevated to be Chief Justice. He was the author of Turning Right, a 1992 book on the early years of the Rehnquist Court. He is also the co-author of the two-volume Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court published by the CQ Press.
Mr. Savage writes regularly on national legal issues. Prior to moving to the Washington bureau, he was an education writer for the paper in Los Angeles covering the schools and the University of California. He has degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northwestern University. He grew up in the Pittsburgh area.
- Professor Elizabeth Sepper
Professor Elizabeth Sepper is a nationally recognized scholar of religious liberty, health law, and equality. She has written extensively on conscientious refusals to provide reproductive and end-of-life healthcare and on conflicts over religion and insurance coverage. Her recent work focuses on legal theoretical and policy debates related to the antidiscrimination obligations of public accommodations—that is, businesses, social service providers, and membership organizations that are open to the public—under federal, state, and local laws. Professor Sepper’s articles appear in top journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Gender & Law. Her article, Doctoring Discrimination in the Same-Sex Marriage Debates, on the issue of religious objections to gay rights won multiple awards, including the 2014 Dukeminier Award for best sexuality law scholarship. She is the editor of Law, Religion, and Health in the United States.
Professor Sepper received her Bachelor of Arts degree in history magna cum laude with distinction from Boston University. She received her latin legum magister and juris doctorate degrees magna cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she served as an notes editor of New York University Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Marjorie Rendell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, practiced human rights law with a focus on women’s rights, and was a Center for Reproductive Rights fellow at Columbia Law School. Prior to joining the Texas faculty, she was a professor at Washington University School of Law. During 2018-19, she held the LAPA\Crane Fellowship in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University to work on a project entitled Sex in Public, which explores the history of sex discrimination in public accommodations.
- Kathleen Sullivan
Kathleen M. Sullivan is partner and founding chair of the national appellate practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP. She has argued over 200 appeals including eleven in the United States Supreme Court. Before joining the firm, Kathleen was a professor of law at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools and served as the eleventh Dean of Stanford Law School. She holds a juris doctorate. from Harvard, a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell and an master of arts degree from Oxford (which she attended as a Marshall Scholar), and was a law clerk to Circuit Judge James L. Oakes of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In her academic life, Kathleen authored numerous articles on constitutional law and the Supreme Court, and for the past twenty-five years she has co-authored the nation’s leading casebook on constitutional law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and the American Philosophical Society, and was recently honored with The American Lawyer’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Professor Jonathan Turley
Jonathan Turley is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. After a stint at Tulane Law School, Professor Turley joined the George Washington Law faculty in 1990, and in 1998, became the youngest chaired professor in the school’s history.
He is the founder and executive director of the Project for Older Prisoners. He has written more than three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals including those of Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, and Northwestern Universities. He most recently completed a three-part study of the historical and constitutional evolution of the military system.
(more…) - Dean Kevin Washburn
Kevin K. Washburn is the law dean of the University of Iowa and previously served as the law dean at of the University of New Mexico. He also has been a member of the law faculties at Minnesota and Arizona. Earlier in his career, he served as an honors program attorney at the United States Department of Justice, and then as a federal Indian Country prosecutor in New Mexico. He also served as the General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission, before becoming a law professor.
In the second term of the Obama Administration, Dean Washburn returned to federal public service as the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the United States Department of the Interior. His most recent public service was leading the Biden-Harris transition team for the Department of the Interior. Dean Washburn is a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and spent much of his childhood within the boundaries of the Chickasaw reservation in Oklahoma. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, and then graduated from Yale Law School. He clerked for Judge William C. Canby, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
- Professor John Yoo
John Yoo is the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Professor Yoo’s most recent book is The Administrative State Before the Supreme Court: Perspectives on the Non-Delegation Doctrine (co-edited with Peter Wallison). Other books include Defender-in-Chief: Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power; Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War; Point of Attack: Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare; Taming Globalization; and Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George Bush.
(more…)