Floyd Abrams
Floyd Abrams is senior counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, and has been a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School and a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of three books about the First Amendment of which the most recent was The Soul of the First Amendment (2017). Abrams has argued numerous cases involving the First Amendment in the Supreme Court and lower courts. Among others, he was co-counsel to the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, counsel to the Brooklyn Museum in its litigation against New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and counsel to Senator Mitch McConnell in the Citizens United case. Former Yale Law School Dean Robert Post has observed that "no lawyer has exercised a greater influence on the development of First Amendment jurisprudence in the last four decades."
Sheila Bedi
Sheila A. Bedi is a clinical professor of law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and director of the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, a law school clinic that provides students with the opportunities to work within social-justice movements on legal and policy strategies aimed at redressing over-policing and mass imprisonment. Bedi litigates civil-rights claims on behalf of people who have endured police violence and abusive prison conditions. She also represents grassroots community groups seeking to end mass imprisonment and to redress abusive policing. Bedi teaches classes on legal reasoning and writing and the law of state violence to students who are incarcerated through Northwestern’s Prison Education Program. Bedi’s partnerships with affected communities on litigation and policy campaigns have closed notorious prisons and jails, increased community oversight of law enforcement, created alternatives to imprisonment and improved access to public education and mental health services. Previously, Bedi served as a deputy legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Her honors include the NAACP’s Vernon Dahmer and Fannie Lou Hamer Award and the Federal District Court Excellence in Public Interest Award (N.D. IL). Bedi writes about race, gender, and the justice system and her commentary has been published by U.S. News and World Reports, Huffington Post and USA Today.
Bruce Brown
Bruce D. Brown is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and a former journalist and partner in the Washington office of Baker & Hostetler. Prior to joining the firm, Brown worked as a federal court reporter for Legal Times and as a newsroom assistant to David Broder at the Washington Post. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Master’s in English Literature from Harvard University, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Stanford University.
Andy Celli
Andrew G. Celli, Jr., a founding partner of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, is a trial and appellate lawyer who represents individuals and institutions in constitutional, civil rights, and commercial matters in courts around the country. Often appearing on behalf of governments and public officials, businesses whose interests intersect with public policy, or individuals challenging government action or in disputes with powerful institutions, Mr. Celli uses his legal skills and his experience in government and politics to provide advice, counsel, and effective representation in court in the case or matter at hand – and to make change.
Scott Cummings
Scott Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, access to justice, and local government law. A recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Cummings is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and Democracy, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the twenty-first century, and a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, Professor Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding.
Professor Cummings’s recent books explore how innovative legal mobilization produces transformative social change. His publications include Lawyers and Movements: Legal Mobilization in Transformative Times (Oxford forthcoming), An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles (Oxford 2021), and Global Pro Bono: Causes, Consequences and Contestation (with Fabio de Sa e Silva and Louise Trubek) (Cambridge 2021). Professor Cummings is also co-author of Making Public Interest Lawyers in a Time of Crisis: An Evidence-Based Approach (with Catherine Albiston and Richard Abel), a National Science Foundation funded study that examines the factors causing law students to enter and persevere in public interest careers.
Professor Cummings is co-author of the first public interest law textbook, Public Interest Lawyering: A Contemporary Perspective (with Alan Chen) (Wolters Kluwer, 2012), and co-editor of a leading legal profession casebook, Legal Ethics (with Deborah Rhode, David Luban, and Nora Engstrom) (8th ed. Foundation Press, 2016). He is the author of numerous articles on lawyers and social justice, which have appeared in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals.
Before joining the UCLA faculty in 2002, Professor Cummings clerked for Judge A. Wallace Tashima on the Ninth Circuit, and James Moran on the district court in Chicago. He began his legal career in Los Angeles working with community groups to build economic opportunity and political empowerment. In 1998, he was awarded a Skadden Fellowship to work in the Community Development Project at Public Counsel in Los Angeles, where he provided transactional legal assistance to nonprofit organizations and small businesses engaged in community development efforts. He has proudly continued working with colleagues at Public Counsel to advance economic justice through research and policy advancing, producing groundbreaking reports on the legal barriers to street vending and the need for countywide rent control.
John Davisson
John Davisson is Senior Counsel and Director of Litigation at EPIC. John’s work at EPIC has covered a wide range of subjects, including data protection, consumer privacy, artificial intelligence, open government, privacy impact assessments, census confidentiality, free speech, anonymity, donor privacy, and voter privacy. John has litigated cases under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, and the E-Government Act, both at the trial and appellate level. John led EPIC’s case against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to halt the collection of voter data from all 50 states by a White House commission and EPIC’s case against the Department of Justice to obtain unreleased material from the Mueller Report. John has testified before Congress, argued before the D.C. Circuit, and appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
John first came to EPIC in 2015 as a clerk in the Internet Public Interest Opportunities Program. He previously clerked at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, served as a student attorney in the Civil Rights Section of Georgetown’s Institute for Public Representation, and interned at the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. John is a 2016 graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, where he was managing editor of the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy, a Georgetown Law Fellow, and an NGO observer to the 9/11 military commission at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. He worked as a journalist before entering the law and earned his B.A. at Columbia University. John is a member of the New York and District of Columbia bars.
Bridget Fahey
Bridget Fahey is an expert in constitutional law and the law of data. Her work on federalism documents and theorizes the unexpected ways the federal government and states interact and the unorthodox legal tools they use to structure their joint projects. Her research on data focuses on the legal and technical rules that structure the government’s access to and use of data, and more broadly the manner in which the public law of data differs from the law governing other forms of power. Professor Fahey is an affiliated scholar the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute and Co-Director of the Institute’s Data Ecology Research Initiative.
Professor Fahey’s recent co-authored article, Layered Constitutionalism, 124 Colum. L. Rev. 1295 (2024), identifies and theorizes a largely hidden body of federal constitutional rules that shape state structural choices. Her prior article, Coordinated Rulemaking and Cooperative Federalism’s Administrative State, 132 Yale L.J. 1213 (2023), argues that cooperative federalism programs have given rise to a distinctive administrative state—with forms of administrative action and legal frameworks that diverge in important respects from ordinary federal and state administrative law. And an earlier article, Federalism by Contract, 129 Yale L.J. 2326 (2020), revealed the federal government and states longstanding use of contract-like instruments to structure intergovernmental programs and transact in a wide range of governmental powers. Before joining the Chicago faculty, her article Consent Procedures and American Federalism, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 1561 (2015), identified and theorized the federal government’s practice of using cooperative federalism programs to intervene in and reshape state and local governing processes.
Professor Fahey also leads interdisciplinary work on the law of data, focusing particularly on government stewardship of private data. Her forthcoming co-authored article, The Structural Law of Data, develops a new account of data’s structural law—the processes, institutional arrangements, transparency rules, and control mechanisms that shape the federal government’s access to, and use of, private data. It builds on a prior article, Data Federalism, 135 Harv. L. Rev. 1107 (2022), which uncovers an extensive intergovernmental market in private data exchanged by federal, state, and local governments, and the unusual cross-governmental bureaucracies that govern that market. Another forthcoming co-authored article, The Law of Information States: Evidence from China and the United States, theorizes how law can be used to combat government misinformation and introduces the idea of “information federalism.” Professor Fahey’s work helps form the basis of interdisciplinary research funded by the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, where she serves as a co-director of the Data Ecology Research Initiative.
Professor Fahey received a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty, she was a litigator at the Washington DC office of WilmerHale, held a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was a law clerk on the DC Circuit and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier in her career, Professor Fahey worked as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and Berlin.
She teaches 1L Contracts and Constitutional Law, co-coordinates the Public Law Workshop, and has taught informal Greenberg Seminars on eclectic topics including Free Speech on Campus, Space Law, Order Without Law, and others.
Miriam Gohara
Miriam Gohara is Deputy Dean for Experiential Education and a clinical professor of law at Yale Law School. She founded the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, which represents clients in sentencing and postconviction cases. Before joining the Law School faculty, Professor Gohara spent 16 years representing death-sentenced clients in post-conviction litigation, first as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and then as a specially designated federal public defender with the Federal Capital Habeas Project. Professor Gohara has litigated cases in state and federal courts around the United States, including the United States Supreme Court.
Professor Gohara teaches and writes about capital and non-capital sentencing, incarceration, and the historical and social forces implicated in culpability and punishment.
Professor Gohara is a member of the board of trustees of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia University.
Elizabeth Goitein
Elizabeth “Liza” Goitein is senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.
Goitein is a nationally recognized expert on presidential emergency powers, government surveillance, and government secrecy. Her writing has been featured in major newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and the New Republic, and she has appeared frequently on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR. She has testified on several occasions before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.
Before joining the Brennan Center, Goitein served as counsel to Sen. Russ Feingold, chair of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice.
Goitein graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Judge Michael Daly Hawkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 2021–22, she was a member of the inaugural class of senior practitioner fellows at the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government.
Goitein is admitted to the bar in the State of Massachusetts. Her practice in Washington, DC, is limited to practice before U.S. courts as provided in DCCA Rule 49(c)(3).
Anna Gomez
Anna M. Gomez was sworn in as Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission in September 2023. She believes the FCC does best when its work honors the people it serves.
The Commissioner brings over 30 years of public and private sector experience in domestic and international communications law and policy to her position. In 2023, she led U.S. preparations for the International Telecommunication Union World Radiocommunication Conference 2023 (WRC-23) for the Department of State and from 2009 to 2013 she served as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Deputy Administrator. While at NTIA she oversaw the successful transition to digital television, as well as efforts that resulted in the establishment of a broadband network for first responders.
Commissioner Gomez also served for 12 years in various positions at the FCC, including as Deputy Chief of the International Bureau and as Senior Legal Advisor to then-Chairman William E. Kennard. She also served as Counsel to the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, and as Deputy Chief of Staff of the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration. Prior to joining the State Department in 2023, Commissioner Gomez worked in private practice focusing on telecommunications law.
Born in Orlando, Florida, Commissioner Gomez spent her childhood in Bogota, Colombia before her family relocated to New Jersey. She now resides in Virginia. Commissioner Gomez earned her B.A. in Pre-Law from Pennsylvania State University and her J.D. from George Washington University Law School.
Commissioner Gomez is committed to a vibrant, strong, and competitive telecommunications and media marketplace that meets consumer needs and promotes U.S. economic prosperity and security.
She believes that it is critical to our continued success as a nation that everyone in rural, Tribal, suburban, and urban communities should be able to get and stay connected. She knows what it means to risk the loss of connection and believes that we need an affordability program like the Affordable Connectivity Program to promote economic prosperity and give people a fighting chance.
Commissioner Gomez believes we must continue to foster innovation in the tech and telecom sector by facilitating opportunities for new services, creative spectrum policies, and continued leadership on the space economy. This includes continued implementation of the National Spectrum Strategy and reinstatement of the FCC’s auction authority.
She knows we must be vigilant about protecting consumers. From spam calls and texts to accessible emergency alerts, Commissioner Gomez believes consumers’ interests must lead communications policymaking. That also means ensuring our first responders can communicate in times of crisis, and that our connections are secure and resilient. Additionally, as a Latina American, she brings her skills and perspective to the Commission on ways to reach all communities where they are, including the Latino community.
Commissioner Gomez firmly believes that the First Amendment is a pillar of American democracy and a free press is necessary for democracy to thrive. She believes that regardless of changes in the media ecosystem, the FCC should continue to uphold its longstanding media policy principles: diversity, localism, and competition.
Bill Grueskin
Bill Grueskin's career includes senior print and online editing roles, as well as six years as academic dean at Columbia Journalism School.
He began his journalism career as a reporter and editor at the Daily American in Rome. He then served as a VISTA volunteer and founding editor of the weekly Dakota Sun on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.
He worked as a reporter and editor in Baltimore and Tampa before moving to The Miami Herald where he eventually became city editor. On his first day in that post, Hurricane Andrew hit Dade County, and the Herald’s coverage of the storm won the Pulitzer Gold Medal for public service.
Grueskin joined The Wall Street Journal in 1995, editing Page One features and projects. In June 2001, he became managing editor of WSJ.com and oversaw the staff during and after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, next to WSJ’s offices. While at WSJ.com, the number of subscribers doubled to more than one million, and the site introduced blogs, interactive graphics and video.
In 2007, he was named WSJ’s deputy managing editor, overseeing 14 domestic news bureaus, and combining print and online editing desks.
He came to Columbia in 2008 as Academic Dean. At the Journalism School, he oversaw a dramatic transformation of the curriculum, designed to give students more flexibility to focus on skills ranging from video to data visualization to long-form digital journalism.
In May 2011, Grueskin, along with Ava Seave and Lucas Graves, co-authored "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a report that examines online traffic and engagement patterns, emerging news platforms, paywalls, aggregation and new sources of revenue.
Grueskin has a B.A. in classics from Stanford University and an M.A. in international economics and U.S. foreign policy from Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.
Linda Greenhouse
Linda Greenhouse is a Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. She covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times between 1978 and 2008 and continues to write regularly for the newspaper’s Opinion pages. Greenhouse received several major journalism awards during her 40-year career at the Times, including the Pulitzer Prize (1998) and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Kennedy School (2004). In 2002, the American Political Science Association gave her its Carey McWilliams Award for “a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.” Her books include a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, “Becoming Justice Blackmun;” “Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling”(with Reva B. Siegel); “The U.S. Supreme Court, A Very Short Introduction,” (Oxford University Press , 3rd ed. 2024); “The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right” (with Michael J. Graetz, 2016); a memoir, “Just a Journalist: Reflections on the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between;” (Harvard University Press, 2017) and “Justice on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court” (Random House, 2021). In her extracurricular life, Greenhouse served from 2017 to 2023 as president of the American Philosophical Society, the country's oldest learned society, which in 2005 awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in jurisprudence and the humanities. From 2004 to 2023, she served on the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is an honorary member of the American Law Institute, which in 2002 awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal. She has been awarded 13 honorary degrees. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard) and earned a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School, which she attended on a Ford Foundation fellowship.
Gautam Hans
Gautam Hans is a Clinical Professor of Law and founding Director of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Clinic (CRCLC). CRCLC works on cases and projects relating to a wide range of topics including free speech and association; current issues involving developing technologies; and amicus briefs and policy and advocacy.
An expert on speech, privacy, civil liberties, and technology policy, Professor Hans analyzes, through research and advocacy, how new and developing technologies implicate constitutional law, privacy and data protection, and public policy. Professor Hans also researches and works on issues relating to clinical legal education, with a particular focus on social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion. In additional to VRCLC, he teaches Professional Responsibility and Critical Theory in Clinical Practice.
A frequent media commenter on privacy, free speech, and surveillance, Professor Hans regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on current issues in technology law, clinical legal education, and free speech. He has served in multiple leadership roles in the national clinical legal education community, including as co-President of the Clinical Legal Education Association and on the board of the Center for Study of Applied Legal Education. In 2024, Professor Hans received the M. Shanara Gilbert Award from the American Association of Law Schools Section on Clinical Legal Education.
In addition to his scholarship on free speech, technology law and policy, and clinical legal education, Professor Hans has a robust pro bono amicus practice in state and federal courts focusing on novel issues in free speech, privacy, and technology law. He is also a co-author of the leading Professional Responsibility casebook Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law (7th ed., 2025).
Before joining Cornell Law, Professor Hans served as Associate Clinical Professor of Law and founding director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Stanton Foundation First Amendment Clinic. He completed his clinical teaching fellowship at the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to his academic career, Professor Hans worked at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, CA, for four years, focusing on privacy, free speech, and surveillance law and policy.
Professor Hans earned his J.D., cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School; his M.S. in information policy from the University of Michigan School of Information; and his B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. While in graduate school, he was Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review and served as a student-attorney in the Entrepreneurship Clinic and the Civil-Criminal Litigation Clinic. Before entering graduate school, Professor Hans was an editorial assistant in the Knopf Group of Random House.
Lauren Harper
Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy, a position established to honor and continue the legendary whistleblower’s fight for secrecy reform. She joins FPF after a decade fighting excessive government secrecy with Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, the National Security Archive. There she served as public policy director and helped historians, journalists, and the public win the declassification of historically significant government documents. Lauren holds a master’s in public policy and a master’s in Middle Eastern studies, both from the University of Chicago.
Mark Jackson
Mark H. Jackson was most recently the Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Dow Jones & Co. Prior to that position, from which he resigned after 8 years, he was Associate General Counsel of HarperCollins Publishers, and before that a litigation associate and then partner at the New York law firm Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Lehrer, where he practiced for twelve years. At the firm, Mark specialized in representing newspaper, magazine and book publishers, motion picture studios and television stations, both in conducting pre-publication and pre-broadcast review, and in litigating cases on behalf of those clients. He is currently serving as Legal Counsel for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Jackson is chair of the advisory board of The Miller Theatre at Columbia University and serves on the board of directors of The Magnum Foundation.
Jameel Jaffer
Jameel Jaffer is the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was founded by Columbia University and the Knight Foundation in 2016 to promote the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. He previously served in various leadership positions at the American Civil Liberties Union, ultimately overseeing the organization’s work on democracy, free speech, privacy, technology, national security, and international human rights.
Jaffer has argued human rights and civil liberties cases in multiple appeals courts as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, and has testified many times before the U.S. Congress. He has edited two books—one about the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies (co-edited with Amrit Singh) and another about the Obama administration’s use of drones to carry out extrajudicial killings overseas. He delivered the keynote address at the Harvard Law Review’s annual gala in 2022, the Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2017, and the Peter Zenger Lecture at Columbia Law School in 2016. His recent writing has been published in New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Guardian, and Foreign Affairs.
Early in his legal career, Jaffer served as a law clerk to Honorable Amalya L. Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then as a law clerk to the Right Honorable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada.
Harold Hongju Koh
Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale Law School in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.
Professor Koh is one of the country’s leading experts in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He first began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and served as its fifteenth Dean from 2004 until 2009. From 2009 to 2013, he took leave as the Martin R. Flug ’55 Professor of International Law to join the State Department as Legal Adviser, service for which he received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award. From 1993 to 2009, he was the Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, and from 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
Professor Koh has received 18 honorary degrees and more than 30 awards for his human rights work, including awards from Columbia Law School and the American Bar Association for his lifetime achievements in international law. He has authored or co-authored nine books, published more than 200 articles, testified regularly before Congress, and litigated numerous cases involving international law issues in both U.S. and international tribunals. He is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute.
He holds a B.A. degree from Harvard College and B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was Developments Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before coming to Yale, he served as a law clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, worked as an attorney in private practice in Washington, and served as an Attorney-Adviser for the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice.
Makena Kelly
Makena Kelly is a senior writer at WIRED focused on the intersection of politics, power, and technology. She writes the Politics Lab newsletter that helps you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality. She was previously at The Verge, CQ Roll Call, and the Lincoln Journal Star. Makena graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University with a Bachelor of Arts in English.
Scarlet Kim
Scarlet Kim is a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, where she works on litigation and advocacy to protect free speech and the right to privacy in the digital age. Scarlet was previously a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, where she focused primarily on litigation and advocacy at the intersection of immigration and national security. Prior to joining the ACLU, Scarlet worked as a legal officer at Privacy International, an associate legal adviser at the International Criminal Court, and a Gruber Fellow in Global Justice at the New York Civil Liberties Union. She also served as a law clerk for the Hon. John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.
Heidi Kitrosser
Heidi Kitrosser is the William W. Gurley Professor of Law. Before joining Northwestern in 2022, she was the Robbins Kaplan Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she had joined the law faculty in 2006. From 2003-2006, she was an assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School.
Kitrosser is an expert on the constitutional law of federal government secrecy and on separation of powers and free speech law more broadly. She has written, spoken, and consulted widely on these topics. Her book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, was published in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. It was awarded the 2014 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. Kitrosser’s articles have appeared in many venues, including the Supreme Court Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary. She is a 2017 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kitrosser has been involved in drafting several amicus briefs in recent years challenging threats to free speech, academic freedom, and government accountability. She is also a founding steering committee member of the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN). FELN is a network of law school clinics, academics, and practitioners (including nonprofits) across the country that seeks to promote and protect free speech, free press, and the flow of information.
Kitrosser graduated from UCLA in 1992, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a BA in political science. She received her JD degree from Yale Law School in 1996. During her third year at Yale, she won the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for best oral argument in the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals.
Following law school, she clerked for Judge William Rea on the District Court for the Central District of California and for Judge Judith Rogers on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She also worked as an associate at the Washington, DC, office of Jenner & Block.
Genevieve Lakier
Professor of Law, Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar
Genevieve Lakier teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on the social media platforms.
Genevieve has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the Southern District of New York and Judge Martha C. Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before joining the faculty, Genevieve taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law.
John Langford
John Langford is a Visiting Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and counsel at Protect Democracy. At Protect Democracy, he focuses primarily on issues related to the First Amendment, news-gathering, free expression, and disinformation. Before joining Protect Democracy, Langford was a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and the Floyd Abrams Fellow and Staff Attorney for the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. He previously clerked for the Honorable Robin S. Rosenbaum on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and worked as a litigation associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP.
Stacy Livingston
Stacy Livingston is a clinical lecturer in law at Yale Law School. From 2023 to 2024, she clerked for the Honorable Susan L. Carney of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Livingston previously served as a Legal Fellow at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, where she co-authored amicus briefs filed before the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Livingston has also completed internships with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the Legal Aid Society, and the New York Legal Assistance Group. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was recognized three times as a Dean’s Scholar and received the Pro Bono Award for more than 1,000 hours of service. She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College.
Summer Lopez
Summer Lopez joined PEN America in 2017, and serves as the chief program officer of Free Expression Programs. Beginning in Nov 2024, she is also serving as interim co-CEO of PEN America. She previously worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for eight years, and was most recently posted to Zimbabwe, where she served as the deputy director of the Office of Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at the USAID Mission in Harare. Earlier, she was at USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., focused on the Middle East and Asia in the Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance. In that position, she played a leading role in advocating for effective integration and promotion of democratic and human rights principles in U.S. policy, strategy, and programming in the Middle East and Asia, including during the period of the Arab Spring. She also represented USAID in the development of the first U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, issued in 2011.
Before entering government, Lopez was the vice president of operations at The AjA Project, a nonprofit organization that provides media-based programs for refugee, displaced, and immigrant youth in the U.S. and internationally. In addition to Zimbabwe, she has lived and worked in Egypt, Ghana, India, and Nepal. She holds a BA in English and American literature and language from Harvard and a master in public affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Sarah Ludington
Sarah Ludington ’92, a respected scholar in the fields of free speech and privacy law, joined the Duke Law faculty in 2020 as a clinical professor of law and director of the First Amendment Clinic. She had served, since July 2017, as associate dean of academic affairs at Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law, where she also taught courses in constitutional law, information privacy, and civil procedure. She was previously an associate professor of law at Campbell Law, where she was granted tenure in 2015. She taught legal writing at Duke Law from 2001 to 2008.
Ludington’s work has examined the implications of tenure for the speech of professors and methods for deterring the misuse of personally identifiable information. She has also co-authored articles about the history of sovereign debt repudiation and the doctrine of odious debts, and published a chapter on the history of USDA farm and food subsidies in Food Fights: How the Past Matters in Contemporary Food Debates (UNC Press 2017).
Ludington has taught in the summer study abroad program that Campbell Law co-sponsors in Cambridge, England and has lectured on American constitutional law at University College Cork in Ireland and at the Duke-Geneva Institute in Transnational Law.
Prior to starting her academic career, Ludington practiced law in Washington, D.C., and New York. She clerked for Judges Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Joyce Hens Green of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She also has significant experience teaching literature and writing in secondary schools.
Ludington received her JD with high honors and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. She received the Hervey M. Johnson writing prize for best published note, was a note editor of the law journal, and received the American Jurisprudence Award for Constitutional Law.
Judge J. Michael Luttig
J. Michael Luttig served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit for 15 years, from 1991 to 2006. He is currently counselor and special advisor to the Coca-Cola Company and its board of directors. Prior to joining the Coca-Cola Company, Judge Luttig was counselor and senior advisor to the Boeing Company CEO and board of directors. He was executive vice president and general counsel of Boeing from 2006 to 2020. Before he was appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, he served as assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice and counselor to the attorney general of the United States. He was assistant counsel to the president at the White House from 1981 to 1982 under President Ronald Reagan. From 1982 to 1983, he was a law clerk to then-Judge Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1983 to 1985, he served as a law clerk and then special assistant to the chief justice of the United States.
Judge Luttig earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington and Lee University and his law degree from the University of Virginia.
Jonathan Manes
Jonathan Manes is an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois Office and a member of the teaching faculty at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where he co-directs a practicum focused on media law and government transparency. His litigation and advocacy work focuses on government accountability and civil rights violations that flow from government surveillance, police technologies, and national security policies. He previously led MJC’s work on voting rights. Manes has published scholarly work on the conflicts between secrecy and democratic accountability, focusing on surveillance technologies and national security. His academic writing has appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and Yale Law Journal Forum. Manes is a co-founder and member of the steering committee of the Free Expression Legal Network. He previously served on the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union. He clerked for Justice Morris J. Fish of the Supreme Court of Canada. He graduated from Yale Law School, the London School of Economics.
Amanda Martin
Amanda Martin is a communications lawyer, representing traditional and social media on issues related to the libel and privacy, the internet, intellectual property, and other speech-based concerns. Ms. Martin is general counsel to the N.C. Press Association, an organization of approximately 200 N.C. newspapers. For more than 25 years, she routinely has counseled reporters, editors and news directors about avoiding libel suits, gaining access to closed government meetings and records and resisting subpoenas. With the advent of the internet, Ms. Martin expanded her practice to include counseling and representing non-media individuals and organizations with social media issues.
Ms. Martin is the co-author of the North Carolina section of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Open Government Guide and co-editor of the North Carolina Media Law Handbook, to which she also contributes as an author. She is a frequent speaker and panelist at media law forums and workshops and regularly contributes articles to legal, media and other publications. Ms. Martin has taught as an adjunct instructor of media law at the UNC School of Law, the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Campbell Law School.
Ms. Martin has served as the chairman of the N.C. Bar Association’s Constitutional Rights and Responsibility Section Council and its Litigation Section, and she served as a director of the Wake County Bar Association and editor of its newsletter. She enjoys reading, cooking, art and travel and is an active member of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church.
David McCraw
David McCraw serves as the lead newsroom lawyer for The New York Times. He has been at The Times for more than two decades and currently holds the position of Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. He is the author of the book “Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts,” a first-person account of the legal battles that helped shape The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, national security, and the rise of political partisanship in America.
In 2023, Mr. McCraw and his newsroom legal team was honored with the Tony Mauro Media Lawyer Award from The American Lawyer for their advocacy on behalf of press freedom.
In addition to advising the newsroom on libel and other legal issues, Mr. McCraw is one of the nation’s most prolific litigators of Freedom of Information cases. The Times Legal Department has brought more than 130 FOI cases in the state and federal courts over the past 15 years.
Mr. McCraw also oversees international security for Times journalists working in high-risk areas and has served as the crisis response manager when journalists have been kidnapped or detained abroad. He is also a co-founder of the Journalism Refugees Education Fund, a nonprofit that helps exiled media workers and their families pursue higher education in the U.S. and Canada.
Mr. McCraw teaches a course on press law every spring at Harvard Law School and has been an adjunct faculty member at the NYU School of Law. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Cornell University, and Albany Law School.
Joey Mogul
Joey Mogul is a movement lawyer, organizer, and educator. Prior to joining MLL, Joey was a partner at the People’s Law Office for over 25 years where Joey represented survivors of torture, abuse and misconduct by law enforcement officials. Joey also worked with and on behalf of organizers and community organizations seeking justice and liberation.
Joey has sought justice for Chicago Police torture survivors for over 25 years, successfully representing survivors in post-conviction and civil rights cases. Joey also successfully presented the cases to the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) in Geneva, Switzerland in 2006, obtaining a specific finding from the CAT calling for accountability in these cases.
Joey drafted the original City Council ordinance providing reparations for the Chicago Police (Burge) torture survivors in 2013 on behalf of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, an organization Joey initiated and co-founded. On May 6, 2015, in response to a multi-racial, intergenerational grassroots campaign, the Council passed the unprecedented legislation providing reparations to the Burge torture survivors becoming the first municipality to provide systemic redress for racially motivated police violence. Joey worked with scores of others to implement the reparations legislation, including the creation of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which Joey co-founded.
Joey has represented several organizers and activists arrested for participating in actions in support of Black lives, sex workers, LGBTQ liberation, access to healthcare and opposing the prison industrial complex (PIC) and militarism in criminal and civil rights cases. Joey successfully represented the No Cop Academy campaign in their FOIA litigation against the City of Chicago and the Chicago Freedom School (CFS) after CFS was illegally raided by Chicago Police officers. Joey also successfully represented hundreds of anti-Iraq war protestors in a class action civil rights lawsuit challenging their mass arrest and co-coordinated the legal defense of protestors criminally charged.
Joey has also represented scores of LGBTQ people in criminal and civil rights proceedings and is a co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011).
Joey created and directed the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University School of Law, was a Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Cornell University College of Law, and a Givelber Distinguished Public Lecturer at Northeastern University School of Law.
Joey is a graduate of CUNY Law School and Oberlin College.
Jodie Morse
Jodie Morse is the Chief Program and Strategy Officer at Democracy Forward.
Jodie is a litigator and strategic advisor with experience in all three branches of government, private practice, and the non-profit world. She most recently served as Deputy Associate Attorney General at the Department of Justice, where she helped to oversee the Civil Division, the Office of Information Policy, and the Tax Division and also served as the Executive Director of the Reproductive Rights Task Force, where she lead day-to-day the Department’s work to safeguard reproductive freedoms under federal law following the Dobbs decision.
Immediately prior to the Department of Justice, Jodie worked at the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. A founding member of the Democracy Forward litigation team, Jodie also previously served as Deputy General Counsel in the Office of General Counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives and worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and at a global law firm.
Jodie received her J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law and her B.A. magna cum laude from Yale University and served as a law clerk for Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Judge Raymond J. Dearie of the Eastern District of New York.
Shawn Musgrave
Shawn Musgrave is a media law attorney and reporter based in New York. As counsel to The Intercept, Shawn brings considerable experience in government transparency, including the federal Freedom of Information Act, state public records laws, and court access. Prior to joining The Intercept, Shawn worked at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and MuckRock. His reporting has been published in Politico, The Verge, Vice, Reason, and the Boston Globe, among other outlets.
Tobin Raju
Tobin Raju is a Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and an attorney with the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. His work with the clinic includes defending and advancing the First Amendment rights of free expression and the press and advocating for increased government transparency through litigation and policy efforts. He also supervises the clinic’s student attorneys. From 2017 to 2021, Tobin was an associate with the law firm Cahill, Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York, where he practiced First Amendment and media law and represented media organizations and reporters. He previously served as the Stanton First Amendment Fellow for the First Amendment Clinic at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.
Charlie Savage
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage is a Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He specializes in national security and legal policy issues.
Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Savage graduated from Harvard College and earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School. He began his reporting career at the Miami Herald in 1999, moved to the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe in 2003, and then to the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 2008.
Savage’s first book, Takeover (2007), is an investigative history of the Bush administration’s efforts to expand presidential power after the 9/11 attacks. It shows how that agenda traces back to Dick Cheney’s formative experiences in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when the so-called imperial presidency that had grown up during the early Cold War seemed to collapse amid Watergate, Vietnam, and the Church Committee investigation. Savage’s second book, Power Wars (2015), is an investigative history of national-security legal policymaking during the Obama administration. It explores the claim that Barack Obama, defying expectations, often ended up “acting like Bush” on counterterrorism and other security-related matters.
A member of the steering committee for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Savage has also been a Knight Foundation journalism fellow at Yale; a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and a Salzburg Global Seminar faculty fellow. He has twice co-taught a seminar on national security and the Constitution at Georgetown University.
Savage was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2007. His other journalism honors include the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation’s Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency; the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; and the Constitution Project’s Award for Constitutional Commentary.
He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Luiza Savage, editorial director for Washington Post Intelligence, and family.
Jennifer Safstrom
Jennifer Safstrom teaches the Stanton Foundation First Amendment Clinic at Vanderbilt Law School. Before joining Vanderbilt's law faculty, Professor Safstrom worked as counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and as supervising attorney and clinical teaching fellow with the Civil Rights Clinic at Georgetown Law. She also served as the Dunn Legal Fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia.
Safstrom earned her J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center and her B.A. at the University of Miami. Her legal scholarship has been published in the Clinical Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Harvard Latinx Law Review, Barry Law Review, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, and Loyola University Chicago’s Annals of Health Law and Life Sciences, among other journals. She has been quoted in the Washington Post, Above the Law, CityLab, and Breitbart and in other local and national publications.
David A. Schulz
David A. Schulz is Director of the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic, where he serves as the Floyd Abrams Clinical Lecturer and a Senior Research Scholar, and is Senior Counsel to the media and entertainment law group at Ballard Spahr LLP where his practice is concentrated in media law, First Amendment, and intellectual property litigation. Over the past four decades he has handled a wide variety of lawsuits and appeals in federal and state courts located throughout the United States, including precedent-setting cases on the public’s right of access to government proceedings and information, and the scope of constitutional protection for newsgathering. Schulz is a co-author of the leading treatise on newsgathering, Newsgathering and the Law, 5th ed and the author of numerous scholarly articles. He currently serves on the New York Committee on Open Government, the State agency responsible for overseeing the open meetings, freedom of information and personal privacy laws, and is a General Trustee of Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. He is a graduate of Knox College, Yale University, and Yale Law School.
Michael S. Schmidt
I write about the intersection of politics and federal and congressional investigations like the ones into Donald J. Trump and Hunter Biden. My stories typically focus on revealing new details about those investigations or explaining them to readers. I frequently appear on The Times’s podcast “The Daily” to discuss my reporting.
I’ve been a Times reporter covering Washington since 2012. My work has included the F.B.I., the Mueller investigation, the two Trump impeachments and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In 2018, I won two Pulitzer Prizes — one as part of a team that covered the investigations of President Trump, and the other, also shared with a group of colleagues, for stories that revealed a series of sexual harassment settlements that led to Bill O’Reilly’s ouster at Fox News.
I began my career at The Times in 2005 as a clerk on the International desk, where I answered calls from reporters in the field. Two years later, I became an investigative sports reporter, covering doping. I spent 2011 in Baghdad, chronicling the American withdrawal.
In 2020, I wrote the New York Times best-selling book “Donald Trump v. the United States.” I’m an MSNBC contributor and an executive producer and co-creator of the Netflix show “Zero Day,” starring Robert De Niro.
Jed Shugerman
Jed Handelsman Shugerman joined BU Law in 2023 after spending a year as a visiting professor. He received his BA, JD, and PhD (History) from Yale. His book, The People’s Courts (Harvard 2012), traces the rise of judicial elections, judicial review, and the influence of money and parties in American courts. It is based on his dissertation that won the 2009 Cromwell Prize from the American Society for Legal History.
He is currently working on two books on the history of executive power and prosecution in America. The first is tentatively titled “A Faithful President: The Founders v. Royalist Originalism,” questioning the Robert Court’s evidence for its theory of unchecked and unbalanced presidential power. This book draws on his articles “Vesting” (Stanford Law Review forthcoming Spring 2022), “Removal of Context” (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 2022), a co-authored “Faithful Execution and Article II” (Harvard Law Review 2019 with Andrew Kent and Ethan Leib), “The Indecisions of 1789” (forthcoming Penn. Law Review Fall 2022), and “The Creation of the Department of Justice,” (Stanford Law Review 2014). The book offers a new explanation for why a general removal power was not a traditional executive power in early modern America, and it turns out to be a surprising twist (called the “venality of office”) that helped create the modern nation-state and the modern administrative state.
The next book project is “The Prosecutor Politicians: Race, War, and the Causes of Mass Incarceration,” focusing on California Governor Earl Warren, his presidential running mate Thomas Dewey, the Kennedys, World War II and the Cold War, the war on crime, the growth of prosecutorial power, and its emergence as a stepping stone to electoral power for ambitious politicians in the mid-twentieth century. One of the most significant causes of mass incarceration is that American prosecutors doubled their rates of turning arrests into prosecutions in the late twentieth century. This book explains how prosecutors transformed from low-prestige, marginal figures throughout most of American history into arguably the most powerful officers over Americans’ lives.
Each of these books was shaped by his experience with clinical death penalty defense work and prisoners’ rights litigation as a law student and a graduate student. He is also a co-author of amicus briefs on the history of presidential power, the Emoluments Clauses, the Appointments Clause, the First Amendment rights of elected judges, and the due process problems of elected judges in death penalty cases. He wrote a series of op-eds and essays about Trump investigations and impeachments for the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, the Atlantic, Politico, Lawfare, and other media.
Shugerman writes about law, history, politics, and sometimes sports on Shugerblog.com. He is a fan of the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Benjamin Sparks
Ben Sparks is Senior Counsel at American Oversight, a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog that advances truth, accountability, and democracy by enforcing the public’s right to government records. Ben received his undergraduate degree with honors from Bradley University in English. He received his law degree from Marquette University Law School, where he served as an articles editor for the Marquette Law Review. Before joining American Oversight, Ben represented state and local governments and their employees in civil litigation. He is a member of the State Bar of Wisconsin and the D.C. Bar.
Michael Steinberg
Michael J. Steinberg is a professor from practice and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at Michigan Law. His interest lies primarily in civil rights and civil liberties law and mentoring the next generation of public interest lawyers.
Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, Steinberg served for 22 years as the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan, where he oversaw all ACLU litigation in the state.
Steinberg has litigated dozens of high-impact, high-profile cases on a wide range of civil rights issues, including racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, police misconduct, freedom of speech and expression, immigrant rights, voting rights, women’s rights, post-9/11 issues, reproductive freedom, criminal justice reform, religious freedom, right to counsel, environmental justice, prisoner rights, economic justice, and disability rights. The US Supreme Court decided six cases on which he worked.
Steinberg is the founding director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at Michigan Law, which provides students with the opportunity to litigate important civil rights cases under his supervision. He also was the founding director of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Clinic at Wayne State University Law School.
Steinberg often speaks about civil rights and civil liberties at universities and conferences across the country and is interviewed frequently by local and national media. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Public Interest Fellowship, Wayne State University Law School’s Treasure of Detroit Award, and the Detroit National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Arab Civil Rights League’s Justice Award.
Following law school, Steinberg worked in private practice for seven years, specializing in civil rights litigation and civil and criminal appeals. He is a former high school teacher and coach, community organizer, president of the Ann Arbor Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and board member of the Michigan Coalition on Human Rights, Michigan Peace Action, and the Student Advocacy Center of Michigan. He often is asked to tell stories about his cases at Moth Mainstage performances across the country.
Nikhel Sus
Nikhel Sus is Deputy Chief Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), where he specializes in litigation and advocacy to promote accountability, transparency, and ethics in government. Nikhel previously served as a Trial Attorney at the Department of Justice in the Civil Division’s Federal Programs Branch, and as a Counsel at WilmerHale LLP. He clerked for Judge Reggie B. Walton of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and Judge John T. Copenhaver of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. Nikhel received his J.D. with highest honors from the George Washington University Law School, and his B.A. from the College of Charleston.
Nabiha Syed
Nabiha Syed has been described as “one of the best emerging free speech lawyers” by Forbes magazine. She is currently the Assistant General Counsel at BuzzFeed, where she handles publication, privacy, and access matters across the globe.
Prior to BuzzFeed, Nabiha was an associate at Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, a leading First Amendment law firm, and was named the First Amendment Fellow at The New York Times. She has worked on legal access issues at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; counseled on whether to publish hacked and leaked materials; and advised documentary filmmakers through the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. She is the co-founder of the Media Freedom and Information Access legal clinic at Yale Law School. She was named as a “40 Under 40 Rising Star” by the New York Law Journal in 2016, and was a finalist for the Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year Award from the International Bar Association in 2017.
Nabiha is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Yale Law School and Oxford University, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar, as well as a non-resident fellow at both Stanford Law School and Yale Law School. At Columbia Journalism School, Nabiha has been adjunct faculty teaching media law to journalism students. She serves as the Vice Chair of the Student Press Law Center, as the Treasurer for Upturn, and on the American Bar Association Communications and Media Law Committee.
Mario Trujillo
F. Mario Trujillo is a Staff Attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's civil liberties team, where he focuses on the Fourth Amendment and privacy rights. He is also part of the Coders' Rights Project. Prior to joining EFF, Mario was an attorney at the privacy law firm ZwillGen and clerked for a federal magistrate judge on the southern border. Before law school, Mario worked as a technology policy reporter at The Hill newspaper. Mario holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and graduated from the University of New Mexico with degrees in journalism and philosophy.
Nicholas Turner
Nicholas Turner joined the Vera Institute of Justice as its fifth president and director in August 2013. He is the first person of color to occupy the role. He is also the president and director of Vera Action. Under his leadership, Vera has committed itself to ending overcriminalization and mass incarceration in the United States. Vera works to shrink jails and prisons, elevate restoration and a commitment to human dignity, and redefine how public safety is delivered, with greater investment in public health and community. Under Nick’s leadership, Vera has focused its efforts on driving national change, tripled its budget, and strengthened its policy advocacy and ability to shape public debate.
Recent major initiatives from Vera include a successful campaign to eliminate the ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated students, creation of a multi-city network committed to providing representation to immigrants facing deportation, a multi-city effort with prosecutors to reduce racial disparities, and a network focused ending incarceration of girls.
Nick previously served at Vera from 1998 to 2007. During his first tenure, he guided the expansion of Vera’s national work, launching and directing Vera’s state sentencing and corrections program while supervising Vera’s domestic violence projects and the creation of its youth justice program. As vice president and chief program officer, Nick was responsible for the development and launch of the Prosecution and Racial Justice Program and the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons.
Prior to re-joining Vera, Nick was a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he was a member of the foundation’s senior leadership team. He provided leadership and strategic direction on key initiatives, including transportation policy reform in the U.S. to promote social, economic, and environmental interests, and redevelopment in New Orleans to advance racial and socioeconomic integration.
Earlier in his legal career, Nick was an associate in the litigation department of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York from 1997 to 1998. He was a judicial clerk for the late Honorable Jack B. Weinstein, United States District Judge in Brooklyn, from 1996 to 1997. Before attending Yale Law School, he worked with court-involved, homeless and disconnected young people at Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a Washington, DC youth services organization, from 1989 to 1993.
Nick is a current trustee for the Council on Criminal Justice and The Joyce Foundation. He is chair of the Advisory Board of the Policing Project at NYU Law and serves on the Leadership Advisory Council for the Tsai Leadership Program at Yale Law School as well as the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform. Nick has previously served on the boards of Common Justice, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, Living Cities, Center for Working Families, St. Christopher’s Inc., and the advisory council of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance.
Donald B. Verrilli, Jr.
Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. is a partner with Munger, Tolles & Olson, and the founder of its Washington, D.C., office.
Don is one of the nation’s premier Supreme Court and appellate advocates. He served as Solicitor General of the United States from June 2011 to June 2016. Since joining the firm after his government service, he has handled numerous significant cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, including his successful defense of the constitutionality of the federal law establishing the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico in Financial Oversight and Management Board v. Aurelius. He has also won victories for clients in high-stakes class action, antitrust, constitutional, government contracts and copyright appeals.
During his time as Solicitor General, he argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, including landmark decisions upholding the Affordable Care Act (National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell) and recognizing marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges). Don also achieved victories in two important patent cases, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, in a case vindicating the president’s foreign affairs authority in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, and in numerous cases involving civil rights, women’s rights and other matters of national importance involving antitrust, copyright, telecommunications, the environment, the First Amendment, the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, the separation of powers, criminal law and other federal constitutional and statutory matters.
In addition to handling matters before the U.S. Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, Don’s practice focuses on representing and counseling clients on multi-dimensional problems, where litigation, regulation and public policy intersect to shape markets and industries in our evolving economy. He is recognized as a Star Individual by Chambers USA and was named “Lawyer of the Year” for his appellate work in the 2026 edition of The Best Lawyers in America.
Before serving as Solicitor General, Don served as Deputy White House Counsel, and previously as Associate Deputy Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice. In those positions, he counseled President Obama, Cabinet secretaries and other senior government officials on a wide range of legal issues involving national security, economic regulation, domestic policy and the scope of executive and administrative authority.
Prior to his government service, Don spent two decades in private practice representing companies in high stakes matters, particularly in the areas of media and entertainment, and telecommunications law. During this time, he argued a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, the landmark case establishing that file sharing services were subject to the copyright laws, and FCC v. NextWave, which established that the bankruptcy laws allow FCC licensees to keep their licenses while reorganizing. He also achieved a landmark victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Wigginsv. Smith, a case that established the standards for effective assistance of counsel in capital sentencing proceedings.
Don is also a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches classes on the First Amendment and on the Supreme Court. Previously he taught First Amendment law for many years at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Jennifer M. Urban
Jennifer M. Urban is a Clinical Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she is Director of Policy Initiatives at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. She also serves as a co-faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. She has been widely recognized for her research and practice, which focus on how new technologies and the regulatory structures around them interact with civil liberties, innovation, and creative expression.
Urban serves as the inaugural Chair of the Board of the California Privacy Protection Agency, which was created by citizen initiative as the first agency in the United States with full administrative powers focused on consumer privacy. She appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in March 2021.
Prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty, Urban founded and directed the USC Intellectual Property & Technology Law Clinic at the University of Southern California, Gould School of Law. Before that, she was the Samuelson Clinic’s first fellow and an attorney focused on emerging growth companies in Silicon Valley. She graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in biological science and from Berkeley Law with a J.D. (intellectual property certificate). She is a recipient of the received the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2022 California Lawyers Association Intellectual Property Vanguard Award.