Robert Barnes
Robert Barnes has spent most of his career at The Washington Post, as a reporter and editor. He joined the paper to cover politics, and has covered campaigns at the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial level. He served in various editing positions, including metropolitan editor, deputy national editor and national political editor. He has covered the Supreme Court since November 2006.
Sarah Binder
Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, specializing in Congress and legislative politics. She is most recently the co-author with Mark Spindel of The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press 2017). Her earlier books include Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press 1997); with Steven S. Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings Institution Press 1997); Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Brookings Institution Press, 2003) and with Forrest Maltzman, Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary (Brookings Institution Press 2009). Her work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, and elsewhere. Binder is also a political science editor at The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and a former co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 1986 and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1995. Binder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.
Joan Biskupic
Joan Biskupic is a full-time CNN legal analyst and author of The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts. Before joining CNN in 2017, Biskupic was an editor-in-charge for Legal Affairs at Reuters and, previously, the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today. In addition to her biography of John Roberts, Biskupic is the author of books on Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Sonia Sotomayor. She holds a law degree from Georgetown University.
Charles Cameron
Professor Charles Cameron is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He specializes in the analysis of political institutions, particularly courts and law, the American presidency, and legislatures. His work often combines game theory and quantitative methods, and sometimes historical materials. The author of numerous articles in leading journals of political science, he is also the author of Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power (Cambridge UP 2000) which won the American Political Science Association's Fenno Prize, for best book in legislative studies, and William Riker Award, as best book in political economy. A recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, he has been a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Visiting Scholar at Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and has a recurrent visiting affiliation as Professor at New York University School of Law. Before joining the faculty of Princeton, he taught for 15 years at Columbia University. He holds the M.P.A. and Ph.D. (Public Affairs) from Princeton University. He was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
Brandice Canes-Wrone
Brandice Canes-Wrone is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics at Princeton University and Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP). She received a PhD from Stanford, an AB from Princeton, and taught at MIT and Northwestern before returning to Princeton as a faculty member. In 2016, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has written extensively on issues related to American politics, political economy, and elections. Some of her recent writings include “Ideologically Sophisticated Donors: Which Candidates Do Individual Contributors Finance” (American Journal of Political Science), “Judicial Selection and Death Penalty Decisions” (American Political Science Review), and “Elections, Uncertainty, and Irreversible Investment” (British Journal of Political Science). The author of the award-winning Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public (University of Chicago Press), she continues to write on the presidency. Other current research includes the influence of campaign donors on congressional representation, the economic effects of policy uncertainty, and the impact of judicial elections on case outcomes.
Martha Coven
Martha Coven is a Lecturer and John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. She brings to her teaching 25 years of federal policy experience, spanning the executive branch, legislative branch, and nonprofit sector. Most recently, she served in the Obama White House as a Special Assistant to the President at the Domestic Policy Council and as a Program Associate Director at the Office of Management and Budget. Before joining the Administration, Coven spent nearly a decade in the nonprofit sector, handling legislative affairs at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Consumers Union. She began her career on Capitol Hill, in the Office of the House Democratic Leader. Coven holds a B.A. in economics and a J.D. from Yale University.
Jan Crawford
Jan Crawford is the chief legal correspondent for CBS News and a recognized authority on the Supreme Court. Her 2007 book, "Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for the Control of the United States Supreme Court" gained critical acclaim and became an instant New York Times Bestseller. She began covering the Court in 1994 for the Chicago Tribune and was the Supreme Court analyst for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on PBS. She then became a law and political correspondent for all ABC News programs before joining CBS in January 2010. She has reported on most of the major judicial appointments and confirmation hearings of the past 25 years. Crawford is a 1987 graduate of the University of Alabama and a 1993 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. She is a member of the New York Bar.
Mickey Edwards
Mickey Edwards is a visiting professor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs. He was a member of Congress for 16 years and later taught for 11 years at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and as a lecturer at Princeton before returning to Washington as vice president of the Aspen Institute where he directed a leadership program for elected officials. He has been a newspaper columnist, had a weekly commentary on National Public Radio, and is the author of several books, most recently "The Parties Versus the People" (Yale University Press). He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lee Epstein
Lee Epstein is the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests center on law and legal institutions, especially the behavior of judges. Professor Epstein is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law, Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, and a Principal Investigator of the U.S. Supreme Court Database project. In 2019, she held the International Himalaya Law Chair Professorship at National Taiwan University. In 2019-20, she will be a visiting professor/scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Bergen in Norway.
Paul Frymer
Paul Frymer is Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. His research and teaching interests are broadly in American politics and public policy, engaging specifically in questions of law, civil rights and race, labor and employment, parties and social movements, and historical-institutional development.
Robert George
Robert P. George holds Princeton's celebrated McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence, and is the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis; Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism; and co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life; Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics; What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense; and Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters. His scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and the Review of Politics.
Mark H. Gitenstein
Mark is a lawyer in Washington DC. He served as a Senate staffer for seventeen years. His last post was as Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when, among other things, he led the staff of the Committee during the Committee's consideration of the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He wrote an award winning book about that struggle, Matters of Principle, Simon & Schuster, 1992. He practiced law as a partner at Mayer Brown LLP (1989-2009). During 2008, he was counsel to then-Senator Biden when he was being considered for Vice President by the Obama campaign and co-chaired his transition to the vice presidency. He served as US Ambassador to Romania (2009-12). Since then he has returned to the practice of law part-time and has focused on the issues which dominated his mandate in Romania: the rule of law and anti-corruption. He serves as President of the Biden Foundation.
David Greenberg
David Greenberg is a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a frequent commentator in the national news media on contemporary politics and public affairs. He specializes in American political and cultural history. His most recent book, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton, 2016) examines the rise of the White House spin machine, from the Progressive Era to the present day, and the debates that Americans have waged over its implications for democracy.
Prof. Greenberg’s first book, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003) won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Award, and Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Award. Calvin Coolidge (Henry Holt), a biography for the American Presidents Series, was published in December 2006 and appeared on the Washington Post’s list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles (Basic Books, 2006) was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”
Formerly a full-time journalist, Prof. Greenberg is now a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, where he writes a regular column. He previously served as managing editor and acting editor of The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor until the magazine’s death-in-all-but-name in 2014. Early in his career, he was the assistant to author Bob Woodward on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (Simon & Schuster, 1994). He has also been a regular contributor to Slate since its founding and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Daedalus, Dissent, Raritan, and many other scholarly and popular publications. He graduated from Yale, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his PhD from Columbia.
The Honorable Thomas M. Hardiman
Judge Thomas M. Hardiman was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on January 9, 2007 and was confirmed by the Senate (95-0) on March 15, 2007. Prior to becoming an appellate judge, he served more than three years as a trial judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Before taking the bench, Judge Hardiman was in private practice in Washington, D.C. from 1990-1992 and in Pittsburgh from 1992-2003.
In 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Information Technology Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Judge Hardiman was appointed Chairman of the IT Committee in 2013, and he continues to serve in that capacity. In 2012, Judge Hardiman became a member of the American Law Institute and was elected to its Council in 2019. Judge Hardiman regularly teaches a seminar on Advanced Constitutional Law at Duquesne University School of Law and recently taught a one-week course entitled “Constitutional Law: the First and Second Amendments” at Georgetown University Law Center. He is a 1987 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1990 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as a Notes and Comments Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. Judge Hardiman’s chambers are in Pittsburgh.
Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky
Professor Hollis-Brusky teaches courses on American politics, constitutional law and legal institutions at Pomona College. She is the author of the award-winning book Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Oxford: 2015, 2019) and of the forthcoming book Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right's Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture (Oxford: 2020). A go-to expert on the Supreme Court and the conservative legal movement, she has spoken to or written for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Politico, the New Yorker, Newsweek, BBC News, NPR, and many other news outlets. Professor Hollis-Brusky is also a newly minted editor for The Monkey Cage blog hosted by The Washington Post.
John Kastellec
Jonathan Kastellec is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests are in American political institutions, with a particular focus on judicial politics and the politics of Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Political Research Quarterly. He received his B.A. (2000) from Georgetown University and his M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2009) from Columbia University.
The Honorable Robert Katzmann
Robert A. Katzmann is Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, assuming that position on September 1, 2013. At his appointment to the federal bench in 1999, he was Walsh Professor of Government, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University; a Fellow of the Governmental Studies Program of the Brookings Institution; and president of the Governance Institute.
A lawyer and political scientist by training, Judge Katzmann received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Columbia College, A.M. and Ph.D in government from Harvard University, and a J.D. from the Yale Law School, where he was an Article and Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, he joined the Brookings Institution, where he was a research associate, senior fellow, visiting fellow, and acting program director. His books include: the recently published Judging Statutes; Regulatory Bureaucracy; Institutional Disability; Courts and Congress; editor and project director of The Law Firm and the Public Good; co-editor of Managing Appeals in Federal Court; editor and contributing author of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life; and editor and contributing author of Judges and Legislators.
His honors include the Learned Hand Medal of the Federal Bar Council, the Edward Weinfeld Award of the New York County Lawyers Association, the Fuld Award of the New York State Bar Association, the Green Bag award for legal writing, the Charles E. Merriam Award of the American Political Science Association, the Thurgood Marshall Award of the American Bar Association, membership as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and honorary degrees from New York Law School, John Jay College, and Pace University. He has served on many judicial and governmental committees, and on law school boards, including, by appointment of the Chief Justice, as Chair of the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on the Judicial Branch, a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S Judicial Conference and as Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission.
Frances Lee
Frances E. Lee is professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. She is author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (2016) and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (2009). She is also coauthor of Sizing Up The Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (1999) and a textbook, Congress and Its Members. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and other outlets. She is editor of the Cambridge Elements Series in American Politics and a series editor for the Chicago Studies in American Politics. In 2002-2003, she worked on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.
Adam Liptak
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. He joined The Times as a copyboy after graduating from Yale with a degree in English literature. He returned to Yale for a law degree and went on to practice law for 14 years, specializing in First Amendment issues, first at a large New York City law firm and then in the legal department of The New York Times Company. Liptak rejoined the paper’s news staff in 2002 as its national legal correspondent. In 2007, he launched “Sidebar,” a column on legal affairs. In 2008, he became the paper’s Supreme Court correspondent. Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009. He is a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and has taught courses at Yale Law School and New York University School of Law.
Anthony Madonna
Anthony J. Madonna is Associate Professor of Political Science Department at the University of Georgia, where his research focuses on legislative rules, nominations, and the U.S. Senate. He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. His work has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly and Perspectives on Politics.
Nolan McCarty
Nolan McCarty is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was formerly the Chair of the Department of Politics and associate dean at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His research interests include U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political game theory. He is the recipient of the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellowship from the Hoover Institution and the John M. Olin Fellowship in Political Economy. He has co-authored three books: Political Game Theory (2006, Cambridge University Press with Adam Meirowitz), Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (2006, MIT Press with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal) and Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy (with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal). In 2010, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned his A.B. from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.
The Honorable Donald F. McGahn II
Don McGahn represents clients before government agencies, in enforcement matters, and in court disputes arising from government regulation or action. He handles litigation, crisis management, regulatory compliance, and political issues.
Prior to rejoining Jones Day in 2019, Don served as Counsel to the President of the United States, advising Donald J. Trump on all legal issues concerning the President and his administration, including constitutional and statutory authority, executive orders, international agreements, tariffs, trade, administrative law, and national security. Don also managed the judicial selection process for the President. During Don's tenure, a historic number of judges were appointed to the federal bench, including two Supreme Court justices. In addition, he spearheaded President Trump's deregulation efforts, which resulted in deregulation at record rates. Following Don's departure from the White House, the President appointed him to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a nonpartisan, independent agency dedicated to promoting improvement to administrative agency processes.
Don's accomplishments have been recognized at the highest levels of government. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that Don concluded his tenure "not only as the best White House Counsel I've seen on the job, but more broadly, as one of the most successful and consequential aides to any President in recent memory."
Don was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2008, and confirmed in the Senate by unanimous consent, to serve as a member of the Federal Election Commission. He also served as outside Counsel to the Committee on House Administration during the 113th and 114th Congresses and as general counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Christine Nemacheck
Professor Christine Nemacheck joined the Department of Government at William & Mary in 2002. She is an Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Center for the Liberal Arts. Nemacheck serves as W&M's pre-law advisor. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. from The George Washington University. Her research focuses on judicial selection, judicial federalism, and the role of the courts in a separation-of-powers system. Her book, Strategic Selection: Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, was published in 2007. Other work on judicial selection has appeared in political science and law review journals. Her research, which is primarily archival, has been funded by numerous grants and awards from presidential library foundations. She is also the co-author, along with David Magleby and Paul Light, of Government by the People, an introductory American politics textbook.
Nemacheck has received a number of awards for her teaching and research activity, including the Alumni Fellowship Award for excellence in teaching at The College of William & Mary and a Coco Faculty Fellowship. She was named a Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer in 2010 and was an Alumni Memorial Term Distinguished Associate Professor from 2010-2013. She is the former co-editor of the Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics, which was housed at William & Mary between the fall 2010 and spring 2013 semesters. Nemacheck also co-directs the Dunn Civil Liberties Project and supervises students' independent civil liberties research associated with the Project.
David Pozen
David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He teaches and writes about constitutional law and information law, among other topics.
For the 2017-2018 academic year, Pozen was the inaugural visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. From 2010 to 2012, Pozen served as special advisor to Harold Hongju Koh at the Department of State. Previously, Pozen was a law clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Merrick B. Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and a special assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Pozen's scholarship has been discussed in the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Harper's, Politico, Salon, Slate, Time, American Scholar, and numerous other publications. In 2019, the American Law Institute named Pozen the recipient of its Early Career Scholars Medal, which is awarded every other year to "one or two outstanding early-career law professors whose work is relevant to public policy and has the potential to influence improvements in the law."
The Honorable Henry William Saad
Judge Saad graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University Law School, Order of the Coif, practiced for 20 years as a commercial litigator with Dickinson Wright in Detroit, was appointed by the Governor of Michigan to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 1994 and served until his retirement in 2017, and currently practices in the area of complex business litigation as Of Counsel with Young & Associates in Michigan. While in practice with Dickinson Wright and as a Judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals, Judge Saad taught as an adjunct Professor at Wayne State University and University of Detroit Law School, for over 40 years, and taught the subjects of Public and Private Sector Labor Law, Evidence and Ethics. In 1991-92, Judge Saad was nominated by President George Herbert Walker Bush to the federal district court, but said nomination was not acted upon as the Presidential election cycle interrupted any confirmations and upon losing to President Clinton, this nomination expired. Also, in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Judge Saad to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the nomination was repeated in 2003 and 2005, but the Senate ultimately filibustered a number of President’s Bush nominees and deals were made to compromise the issues and Judge Saad withdrew his nomination.
Nancy Scherer
Professor Scherer is Associate Professor of Political Science, Professor of American politics and constitutional law at Wellesley College. She has research and teaching interests in American politics with a primary emphasis on judicial politics and public law. She is the author of the book Scoring Points: Politicians, Activists and the Lower Federal Court Appointment Process. This book explored why the federal court appointment process has become such a divisive political issue in the modern political era. Professor Scherer has also published articles in the journals Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, the Law and Society Review and Northwestern Law Review on topics such as judicial decision-making behavior, judicial appointment politics and diversifying the bench. Professor Scherer has a book, forthcoming, with NYU Press entitled "The Diversity Dilemma: 40 Years of Affirmative Action on the Federal Bench." She was the 2002 recipient of the Edwin S. Corwin Award, given by the American Political Science Association, for best dissertation on public law.
Ilya Shapiro
Ilya Shapiro is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Shapiro is the author of the forthcoming Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, co-author of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution, and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro has testified before Congress, federal agencies, and state legislatures, and has filed more than 300 amicus curiae briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and has been an adjunct professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi Law Schools. In 2015, National Law Journal named him to its 40 under 40 list of “rising stars.” Before entering private practice, Shapiro clerked for U.S. Fifth Circuit Judge E. Grady Jolly. He holds degrees from Princeton, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago Law School.
Sarah Staszak
Sarah Staszak received her PhD in Politics from Brandeis University and is an Associate Research Scholar in the Woodrow Wilson School. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of public law, policy, and American political development. She is the author of No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment (Oxford University Press, 2015; Co-Winner: J. David Greenstone Book Award, 2017), which examines the politics and implications of efforts to constrain access to courts and the legal system in response to the dramatic expansions of the Civil Rights era. Her current book project, Privatizing (In)Justice: Arbitration and Litigation Reform in the U.S., (under contract, University of Chicago Press) investigates the institutional development and politics of the expanding use of binding arbitration. Other ongoing research projects involve medical malpractice reform, provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act that protect the rights of the mentally ill, and the politics of informal bureaucratic rulemaking. Sarah was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University and a Brookings Institution Research Fellow in Governance Studies.
Amy Steigerwalt
Amy Steigerwalt is a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the federal judicial selection process, as well as the role of courts as institutions and the differing influences on judicial and legislative operations and decision-making. She has published four books to date, including Battle Over the Bench: Senators, Interest Groups and the Politics of Court of Appeals Confirmations (UVA Press, 2010) as well as articles in journals such as Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Justice System Journal. A chapter from her book The Puzzle of Unanimity: Consensus on the U.S. Supreme Court (Stanford Press, 2013) was awarded the 2013 Hughes-Gossett Award for the best article published that year in the Journal of Supreme Court History. Her most recent book is Gendered Vulnerability: How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office (Univ. Michigan Press, 2018, coauthored with Jeffrey Lazarus). Dr. Steigerwalt is also the current Editor-in-Chief of Justice System Journal.
Keith Whittington
Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He writes about American constitutional law, politics and history and American political thought. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law and Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University. His most recent books include Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech and Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present. He is currently completing two books, Constitutional Crises, Real and Imagined and The Idea of Democracy in America, from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age.
David A. Yalof
Dr. David A. Yalof is Professor and Department Head of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. His first book, Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees (University of Chicago Press, 1999), was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt Award as the best book published on presidential studies in 1999. He is also the author of Prosecution Among Friends: Presidents, Attorneys General and Executive Branch Wrongdoing (Texas A & M University Press, 2012) and is co-author of The First Amendment and the Media in the Court of Public Opinion (Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Future of the First Amendment: The Digital Media, Civic Education and Free Expression Rights in America’s High Schools (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), and two textbooks: Civil Liberty and Individual Rights (Foundation Press, 2007) and Enduring Democracy: An Introduction to American Government (Sage, 2020).
Robert Barnes has spent most of his career at The Washington Post, as a reporter and editor. He joined the paper to cover politics, and has covered campaigns at the presidential, congressional and gubernatorial level. He served in various editing positions, including metropolitan editor, deputy national editor and national political editor. He has covered the Supreme Court since November 2006.
Sarah Binder
Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, specializing in Congress and legislative politics. She is most recently the co-author with Mark Spindel of The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press 2017). Her earlier books include Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press 1997); with Steven S. Smith, Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings Institution Press 1997); Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Brookings Institution Press, 2003) and with Forrest Maltzman, Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary (Brookings Institution Press 2009). Her work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, the American Journal of Political Science, and elsewhere. Binder is also a political science editor at The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and a former co-editor of Legislative Studies Quarterly. She received her B.A. from Yale University in 1986 and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota in 1995. Binder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.
Joan Biskupic
Joan Biskupic is a full-time CNN legal analyst and author of The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts. Before joining CNN in 2017, Biskupic was an editor-in-charge for Legal Affairs at Reuters and, previously, the Supreme Court correspondent for the Washington Post and for USA Today. In addition to her biography of John Roberts, Biskupic is the author of books on Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Sonia Sotomayor. She holds a law degree from Georgetown University.
Charles Cameron
Professor Charles Cameron is jointly appointed in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He specializes in the analysis of political institutions, particularly courts and law, the American presidency, and legislatures. His work often combines game theory and quantitative methods, and sometimes historical materials. The author of numerous articles in leading journals of political science, he is also the author of Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power (Cambridge UP 2000) which won the American Political Science Association's Fenno Prize, for best book in legislative studies, and William Riker Award, as best book in political economy. A recipient of multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, he has been a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Visiting Scholar at Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and has a recurrent visiting affiliation as Professor at New York University School of Law. Before joining the faculty of Princeton, he taught for 15 years at Columbia University. He holds the M.P.A. and Ph.D. (Public Affairs) from Princeton University. He was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
Brandice Canes-Wrone
Brandice Canes-Wrone is the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs and Professor of Politics at Princeton University and Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics (CSDP). She received a PhD from Stanford, an AB from Princeton, and taught at MIT and Northwestern before returning to Princeton as a faculty member. In 2016, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has written extensively on issues related to American politics, political economy, and elections. Some of her recent writings include “Ideologically Sophisticated Donors: Which Candidates Do Individual Contributors Finance” (American Journal of Political Science), “Judicial Selection and Death Penalty Decisions” (American Political Science Review), and “Elections, Uncertainty, and Irreversible Investment” (British Journal of Political Science). The author of the award-winning Who Leads Whom? Presidents, Policy, and the Public (University of Chicago Press), she continues to write on the presidency. Other current research includes the influence of campaign donors on congressional representation, the economic effects of policy uncertainty, and the impact of judicial elections on case outcomes.
Martha Coven
Martha Coven is a Lecturer and John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. She brings to her teaching 25 years of federal policy experience, spanning the executive branch, legislative branch, and nonprofit sector. Most recently, she served in the Obama White House as a Special Assistant to the President at the Domestic Policy Council and as a Program Associate Director at the Office of Management and Budget. Before joining the Administration, Coven spent nearly a decade in the nonprofit sector, handling legislative affairs at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Consumers Union. She began her career on Capitol Hill, in the Office of the House Democratic Leader. Coven holds a B.A. in economics and a J.D. from Yale University.
Jan Crawford
Jan Crawford is the chief legal correspondent for CBS News and a recognized authority on the Supreme Court. Her 2007 book, "Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for the Control of the United States Supreme Court" gained critical acclaim and became an instant New York Times Bestseller. She began covering the Court in 1994 for the Chicago Tribune and was the Supreme Court analyst for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on PBS. She then became a law and political correspondent for all ABC News programs before joining CBS in January 2010. She has reported on most of the major judicial appointments and confirmation hearings of the past 25 years. Crawford is a 1987 graduate of the University of Alabama and a 1993 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. She is a member of the New York Bar.
Mickey Edwards
Mickey Edwards is a visiting professor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school of public and international affairs. He was a member of Congress for 16 years and later taught for 11 years at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and as a lecturer at Princeton before returning to Washington as vice president of the Aspen Institute where he directed a leadership program for elected officials. He has been a newspaper columnist, had a weekly commentary on National Public Radio, and is the author of several books, most recently "The Parties Versus the People" (Yale University Press). He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Lee Epstein
Lee Epstein is the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests center on law and legal institutions, especially the behavior of judges. Professor Epstein is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law, Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, and a Principal Investigator of the U.S. Supreme Court Database project. In 2019, she held the International Himalaya Law Chair Professorship at National Taiwan University. In 2019-20, she will be a visiting professor/scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the University of Bergen in Norway.
Paul Frymer
Paul Frymer is Professor of Politics and Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous articles and three books: Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America; Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party; and Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. His research and teaching interests are broadly in American politics and public policy, engaging specifically in questions of law, civil rights and race, labor and employment, parties and social movements, and historical-institutional development.
Robert George
Robert P. George holds Princeton's celebrated McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence, and is the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law; Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis; Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism; and co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life; Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics; What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense; and Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters. His scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, and the Review of Politics.
Mark H. Gitenstein
Mark is a lawyer in Washington DC. He served as a Senate staffer for seventeen years. His last post was as Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when, among other things, he led the staff of the Committee during the Committee's consideration of the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He wrote an award winning book about that struggle, Matters of Principle, Simon & Schuster, 1992. He practiced law as a partner at Mayer Brown LLP (1989-2009). During 2008, he was counsel to then-Senator Biden when he was being considered for Vice President by the Obama campaign and co-chaired his transition to the vice presidency. He served as US Ambassador to Romania (2009-12). Since then he has returned to the practice of law part-time and has focused on the issues which dominated his mandate in Romania: the rule of law and anti-corruption. He serves as President of the Biden Foundation.
David Greenberg
David Greenberg is a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a frequent commentator in the national news media on contemporary politics and public affairs. He specializes in American political and cultural history. His most recent book, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton, 2016) examines the rise of the White House spin machine, from the Progressive Era to the present day, and the debates that Americans have waged over its implications for democracy.
Prof. Greenberg’s first book, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003) won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Award, and Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Award. Calvin Coolidge (Henry Holt), a biography for the American Presidents Series, was published in December 2006 and appeared on the Washington Post’s list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles (Basic Books, 2006) was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”
Formerly a full-time journalist, Prof. Greenberg is now a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, where he writes a regular column. He previously served as managing editor and acting editor of The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor until the magazine’s death-in-all-but-name in 2014. Early in his career, he was the assistant to author Bob Woodward on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (Simon & Schuster, 1994). He has also been a regular contributor to Slate since its founding and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Daedalus, Dissent, Raritan, and many other scholarly and popular publications. He graduated from Yale, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his PhD from Columbia.
The Honorable Thomas M. Hardiman
Judge Thomas M. Hardiman was nominated by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on January 9, 2007 and was confirmed by the Senate (95-0) on March 15, 2007. Prior to becoming an appellate judge, he served more than three years as a trial judge on the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Before taking the bench, Judge Hardiman was in private practice in Washington, D.C. from 1990-1992 and in Pittsburgh from 1992-2003.
In 2008, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Hardiman to the Information Technology Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States. Judge Hardiman was appointed Chairman of the IT Committee in 2013, and he continues to serve in that capacity. In 2012, Judge Hardiman became a member of the American Law Institute and was elected to its Council in 2019. Judge Hardiman regularly teaches a seminar on Advanced Constitutional Law at Duquesne University School of Law and recently taught a one-week course entitled “Constitutional Law: the First and Second Amendments” at Georgetown University Law Center. He is a 1987 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1990 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as a Notes and Comments Editor of the Georgetown Law Journal. Judge Hardiman’s chambers are in Pittsburgh.
Professor Amanda Hollis-Brusky
Professor Hollis-Brusky teaches courses on American politics, constitutional law and legal institutions at Pomona College. She is the author of the award-winning book Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Oxford: 2015, 2019) and of the forthcoming book Separate But Faithful: The Christian Right's Radical Struggle to Transform Law and Legal Culture (Oxford: 2020). A go-to expert on the Supreme Court and the conservative legal movement, she has spoken to or written for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Politico, the New Yorker, Newsweek, BBC News, NPR, and many other news outlets. Professor Hollis-Brusky is also a newly minted editor for The Monkey Cage blog hosted by The Washington Post.
John Kastellec
Jonathan Kastellec is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. His research and teaching interests are in American political institutions, with a particular focus on judicial politics and the politics of Supreme Court nominations and confirmations. His research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Political Research Quarterly. He received his B.A. (2000) from Georgetown University and his M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2009) from Columbia University.
The Honorable Robert Katzmann
Robert A. Katzmann is Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, assuming that position on September 1, 2013. At his appointment to the federal bench in 1999, he was Walsh Professor of Government, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University; a Fellow of the Governmental Studies Program of the Brookings Institution; and president of the Governance Institute.
A lawyer and political scientist by training, Judge Katzmann received his A.B. (summa cum laude) from Columbia College, A.M. and Ph.D in government from Harvard University, and a J.D. from the Yale Law School, where he was an Article and Book Review Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, he joined the Brookings Institution, where he was a research associate, senior fellow, visiting fellow, and acting program director. His books include: the recently published Judging Statutes; Regulatory Bureaucracy; Institutional Disability; Courts and Congress; editor and project director of The Law Firm and the Public Good; co-editor of Managing Appeals in Federal Court; editor and contributing author of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life; and editor and contributing author of Judges and Legislators.
His honors include the Learned Hand Medal of the Federal Bar Council, the Edward Weinfeld Award of the New York County Lawyers Association, the Fuld Award of the New York State Bar Association, the Green Bag award for legal writing, the Charles E. Merriam Award of the American Political Science Association, the Thurgood Marshall Award of the American Bar Association, membership as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and honorary degrees from New York Law School, John Jay College, and Pace University. He has served on many judicial and governmental committees, and on law school boards, including, by appointment of the Chief Justice, as Chair of the U.S. Judicial Conference Committee on the Judicial Branch, a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S Judicial Conference and as Chair of the Supreme Court Fellows Commission.
Frances Lee
Frances E. Lee is professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. She is author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (2016) and Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (2009). She is also coauthor of Sizing Up The Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (1999) and a textbook, Congress and Its Members. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and other outlets. She is editor of the Cambridge Elements Series in American Politics and a series editor for the Chicago Studies in American Politics. In 2002-2003, she worked on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.
Adam Liptak
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. He joined The Times as a copyboy after graduating from Yale with a degree in English literature. He returned to Yale for a law degree and went on to practice law for 14 years, specializing in First Amendment issues, first at a large New York City law firm and then in the legal department of The New York Times Company. Liptak rejoined the paper’s news staff in 2002 as its national legal correspondent. In 2007, he launched “Sidebar,” a column on legal affairs. In 2008, he became the paper’s Supreme Court correspondent. Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009. He is a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and has taught courses at Yale Law School and New York University School of Law.
Anthony Madonna
Anthony J. Madonna is Associate Professor of Political Science Department at the University of Georgia, where his research focuses on legislative rules, nominations, and the U.S. Senate. He received his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. His work has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly and Perspectives on Politics.
Nolan McCarty
Nolan McCarty is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was formerly the Chair of the Department of Politics and associate dean at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His research interests include U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political game theory. He is the recipient of the Robert Eckles Swain National Fellowship from the Hoover Institution and the John M. Olin Fellowship in Political Economy. He has co-authored three books: Political Game Theory (2006, Cambridge University Press with Adam Meirowitz), Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (2006, MIT Press with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal) and Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy (with Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal). In 2010, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He earned his A.B. from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.
The Honorable Donald F. McGahn II
Don McGahn represents clients before government agencies, in enforcement matters, and in court disputes arising from government regulation or action. He handles litigation, crisis management, regulatory compliance, and political issues.
Prior to rejoining Jones Day in 2019, Don served as Counsel to the President of the United States, advising Donald J. Trump on all legal issues concerning the President and his administration, including constitutional and statutory authority, executive orders, international agreements, tariffs, trade, administrative law, and national security. Don also managed the judicial selection process for the President. During Don's tenure, a historic number of judges were appointed to the federal bench, including two Supreme Court justices. In addition, he spearheaded President Trump's deregulation efforts, which resulted in deregulation at record rates. Following Don's departure from the White House, the President appointed him to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a nonpartisan, independent agency dedicated to promoting improvement to administrative agency processes.
Don's accomplishments have been recognized at the highest levels of government. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that Don concluded his tenure "not only as the best White House Counsel I've seen on the job, but more broadly, as one of the most successful and consequential aides to any President in recent memory."
Don was nominated by President George W. Bush in 2008, and confirmed in the Senate by unanimous consent, to serve as a member of the Federal Election Commission. He also served as outside Counsel to the Committee on House Administration during the 113th and 114th Congresses and as general counsel to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Christine Nemacheck
Professor Christine Nemacheck joined the Department of Government at William & Mary in 2002. She is an Associate Professor of Government and Director of the Center for the Liberal Arts. Nemacheck serves as W&M's pre-law advisor. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. from The George Washington University. Her research focuses on judicial selection, judicial federalism, and the role of the courts in a separation-of-powers system. Her book, Strategic Selection: Presidential Selection of Supreme Court Justices from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, was published in 2007. Other work on judicial selection has appeared in political science and law review journals. Her research, which is primarily archival, has been funded by numerous grants and awards from presidential library foundations. She is also the co-author, along with David Magleby and Paul Light, of Government by the People, an introductory American politics textbook.
Nemacheck has received a number of awards for her teaching and research activity, including the Alumni Fellowship Award for excellence in teaching at The College of William & Mary and a Coco Faculty Fellowship. She was named a Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer in 2010 and was an Alumni Memorial Term Distinguished Associate Professor from 2010-2013. She is the former co-editor of the Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics, which was housed at William & Mary between the fall 2010 and spring 2013 semesters. Nemacheck also co-directs the Dunn Civil Liberties Project and supervises students' independent civil liberties research associated with the Project.
David Pozen
David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He teaches and writes about constitutional law and information law, among other topics.
For the 2017-2018 academic year, Pozen was the inaugural visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. From 2010 to 2012, Pozen served as special advisor to Harold Hongju Koh at the Department of State. Previously, Pozen was a law clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Merrick B. Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and a special assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Pozen's scholarship has been discussed in the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Harper's, Politico, Salon, Slate, Time, American Scholar, and numerous other publications. In 2019, the American Law Institute named Pozen the recipient of its Early Career Scholars Medal, which is awarded every other year to "one or two outstanding early-career law professors whose work is relevant to public policy and has the potential to influence improvements in the law."
The Honorable Henry William Saad
Judge Saad graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University Law School, Order of the Coif, practiced for 20 years as a commercial litigator with Dickinson Wright in Detroit, was appointed by the Governor of Michigan to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 1994 and served until his retirement in 2017, and currently practices in the area of complex business litigation as Of Counsel with Young & Associates in Michigan. While in practice with Dickinson Wright and as a Judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals, Judge Saad taught as an adjunct Professor at Wayne State University and University of Detroit Law School, for over 40 years, and taught the subjects of Public and Private Sector Labor Law, Evidence and Ethics. In 1991-92, Judge Saad was nominated by President George Herbert Walker Bush to the federal district court, but said nomination was not acted upon as the Presidential election cycle interrupted any confirmations and upon losing to President Clinton, this nomination expired. Also, in 2001, President George W. Bush nominated Judge Saad to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the nomination was repeated in 2003 and 2005, but the Senate ultimately filibustered a number of President’s Bush nominees and deals were made to compromise the issues and Judge Saad withdrew his nomination.
Nancy Scherer
Professor Scherer is Associate Professor of Political Science, Professor of American politics and constitutional law at Wellesley College. She has research and teaching interests in American politics with a primary emphasis on judicial politics and public law. She is the author of the book Scoring Points: Politicians, Activists and the Lower Federal Court Appointment Process. This book explored why the federal court appointment process has become such a divisive political issue in the modern political era. Professor Scherer has also published articles in the journals Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, the Law and Society Review and Northwestern Law Review on topics such as judicial decision-making behavior, judicial appointment politics and diversifying the bench. Professor Scherer has a book, forthcoming, with NYU Press entitled "The Diversity Dilemma: 40 Years of Affirmative Action on the Federal Bench." She was the 2002 recipient of the Edwin S. Corwin Award, given by the American Political Science Association, for best dissertation on public law.
Ilya Shapiro
Ilya Shapiro is director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. Before joining Cato, he was a special assistant/adviser to the Multi-National Force in Iraq on rule-of-law issues and practiced at Patton Boggs and Cleary Gottlieb. Shapiro is the author of the forthcoming Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court, co-author of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution, and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro has testified before Congress, federal agencies, and state legislatures, and has filed more than 300 amicus curiae briefs in the Supreme Court. He lectures regularly on behalf of the Federalist Society, was an inaugural Washington Fellow at the National Review Institute and a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, and has been an adjunct professor at the George Washington University and University of Mississippi Law Schools. In 2015, National Law Journal named him to its 40 under 40 list of “rising stars.” Before entering private practice, Shapiro clerked for U.S. Fifth Circuit Judge E. Grady Jolly. He holds degrees from Princeton, the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago Law School.
Sarah Staszak
Sarah Staszak received her PhD in Politics from Brandeis University and is an Associate Research Scholar in the Woodrow Wilson School. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of public law, policy, and American political development. She is the author of No Day in Court: Access to Justice and the Politics of Judicial Retrenchment (Oxford University Press, 2015; Co-Winner: J. David Greenstone Book Award, 2017), which examines the politics and implications of efforts to constrain access to courts and the legal system in response to the dramatic expansions of the Civil Rights era. Her current book project, Privatizing (In)Justice: Arbitration and Litigation Reform in the U.S., (under contract, University of Chicago Press) investigates the institutional development and politics of the expanding use of binding arbitration. Other ongoing research projects involve medical malpractice reform, provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act that protect the rights of the mentally ill, and the politics of informal bureaucratic rulemaking. Sarah was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University and a Brookings Institution Research Fellow in Governance Studies.
Amy Steigerwalt
Amy Steigerwalt is a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the federal judicial selection process, as well as the role of courts as institutions and the differing influences on judicial and legislative operations and decision-making. She has published four books to date, including Battle Over the Bench: Senators, Interest Groups and the Politics of Court of Appeals Confirmations (UVA Press, 2010) as well as articles in journals such as Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and Justice System Journal. A chapter from her book The Puzzle of Unanimity: Consensus on the U.S. Supreme Court (Stanford Press, 2013) was awarded the 2013 Hughes-Gossett Award for the best article published that year in the Journal of Supreme Court History. Her most recent book is Gendered Vulnerability: How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office (Univ. Michigan Press, 2018, coauthored with Jeffrey Lazarus). Dr. Steigerwalt is also the current Editor-in-Chief of Justice System Journal.
Keith Whittington
Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He writes about American constitutional law, politics and history and American political thought. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law and Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University. His most recent books include Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech and Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present. He is currently completing two books, Constitutional Crises, Real and Imagined and The Idea of Democracy in America, from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age.
David A. Yalof
Dr. David A. Yalof is Professor and Department Head of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. His first book, Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees (University of Chicago Press, 1999), was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt Award as the best book published on presidential studies in 1999. He is also the author of Prosecution Among Friends: Presidents, Attorneys General and Executive Branch Wrongdoing (Texas A & M University Press, 2012) and is co-author of The First Amendment and the Media in the Court of Public Opinion (Cambridge University Press, 2001); The Future of the First Amendment: The Digital Media, Civic Education and Free Expression Rights in America’s High Schools (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), and two textbooks: Civil Liberty and Individual Rights (Foundation Press, 2007) and Enduring Democracy: An Introduction to American Government (Sage, 2020).