Judge Duncan received his B.A. from Louisiana State University in 1994, his J.D. from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in 1997, and his LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 2004. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Louisiana-based Circuit Judge John Malcolm Duhe Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

From 2008-2012, Duncan served as Appellate Chief for Louisiana’s Attorney General’s office. From 2012-2014, he served as general counsel of the Beket Fund for Religious Liberty. From 2004-2008, he was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

Before becoming a judge, Duncan practiced at the Washington, D.C. firm of Schaerr Duncan LLP, where he was a founding partner. He was appointed by President Trump to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on May 1, 2018.

Judge Katsas was appointed to the D.C. Circuit in December 2017. He graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, where he was an executive editor on the Harvard Law Review. Between 1989 and 1992, he served as a law clerk to Judge Edward Becker on the Third Circuit, to then-Judge Clarence Thomas on the D.C. Circuit, and to Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court. Between 1992 and 2001, he was an associate and then partner in the Washington office of Jones Day, where he specialized in appellate and complex civil litigation. Between 2001 and 2009, he served in many senior positions in the Department of Justice, including as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division and as Acting Associate Attorney General. In 2009, he returned to Jones Day. From January to December 2017, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President.

Before joining the bench, Judge Katsas argued more than 75 appeals, including three cases in the Supreme Court, 13 cases in the D.C. Circuit, and cases in every other federal court of appeals. By appointment of the Chief Justice, he served on the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules from 2013 to 2017. In 2016, he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

John Malcolm oversees The Heritage Foundation’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as director of the think tank’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Before joining Heritage in 2012, Malcolm was general counsel at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as well as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School. From 2004 to 2009, Malcolm was executive vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America.

He served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations. Immediately prior to that, he was a partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP. From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Malcolm began his law career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge as well as an associate at the Atlanta-based law firm of Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan. Malcolm is a graduate of Harvard Law School and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Columbia College.

Ted Cruz represents 28 million Texans in the U.S. Senate as a passionate fighter for limited government and economic growth. He has authored 39 legislative measures signed into law. Recent victories include expanding 529 college savings accounts to allow parents to save for K-12 public, private, and religious education, leading the effort to repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate, imposing sanctions on terrorists who use civilians as human shields, designating North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, reauthorizing and reforming NASA, ensuring the availability of additional records to help solve civil rights cold cases, supporting thousands of Texas jobs, and leading the fight to confirm principled constitutionalists to our courts.

Senator Cruz is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, a former law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and former solicitor general of Texas. He has argued nine cases before the Supreme Court. In November of 2018, he was re-elected to the Senate by the people of Texas.

Thomas R. Lee was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court by Governor Gary Herbert in July 2010. He currently serves as Associate Chief Justice and as a member of the Utah Judicial Council. He also chaired the Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Professionalism and Civility during a time in which the court promulgated Standards of Professionalism and Civility for judges in Utah. Justice Lee is a graduate, with high honors, of the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court. Justice Lee then joined the law firm now known as Parr, Brown, Gee & Loveless, where he became a shareholder. Prior to his appointment to the bench, Justice Lee was a full-time professor at the law school at Brigham Young University, where he continues to serve as Distinguished Lecturer. During his years as a full-time law professor, he maintained a part-time intellectual property litigation practice with Howard, Phillips, & Andersen. He also developed a part-time appellate practice, arguing numerous cases in federal courts throughout the country and in the United States Supreme Court. In 2004 - 05, Justice Lee served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

James Heilpern is the President and Managing Partner at Judicial Education Institute and Counsel at Schaerr | Jaffe. He is also the Law and Corpus Linguistics Fellow at J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. Before joining BYU law, he clerked for the Honorable Robert H. Cleland on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and the Honorable Edith Clement on the Fifth Circuit. He graduated magna cum laude from BYU Law School.

James is also a leading figure in the law and corpus linguistics movement, having authored some of the first legal briefs in the country to employ corpus linguistics.  As Senior Fellow at BYU Law School, he has helped shape the legal theory undergirding this new discipline, authoring numerous influential law review articles in top journals. A sought-after speaker for judicial education and CLE courses, James has personally trained judges and clerks on three U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal, one U.S. district court, and seven state supreme courts, as well as dozens of practicing attorneys around the country.

Edward Whelan is the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture. His areas of expertise include constitutional law and the judicial confirmation process. As a contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, he has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. He has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers (including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post), opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal has named Mr. Whelan among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C.

Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Justice Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017), a New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues.

Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government. From just before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, until joining EPPC in 2004, Mr. Whelan was the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the White House Counsel’s Office, the Attorney General and other senior DOJ officials, and departments and agencies throughout the executive branch on difficult and sensitive legal questions. Mr. Whelan previously served on Capitol Hill as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. In addition to clerking for Justice Scalia, he was a law clerk to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In 1981 Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985 from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review.

Josh Hammer is opinion editor of Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, a syndicated columnist through Creators and a contributing writer for American Compass. A frequent pundit and essayist on political, legal and cultural issues, Josh is a constitutional attorney by training. 

An outspoken conservative, Josh opines on conservative intellectual trends, contemporary domestic and foreign policy debates, constitutional and legal issues, and the intersection of law, politics and culture. He has been published by many leading outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, National Affairs, The National Interest, National Review, First Things, The Spectator, The American Mind, American Greatness, American Compass, Townhall, The Daily Wire, Fortune, Fox Business, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Jewish Journal. His first piece of formal legal scholarship was published in 2020 by the University of St. Thomas Law Journal, and he has forthcoming scholarship in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

Josh is a college campus speaker through Young America's Foundation and a law school campus speaker through the Federalist Society. Prior to Newsweek and The Daily Wire, where he was an editor, Josh worked at a large law firm and clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Josh has also served as a John Marshall Fellow with the Claremont Institute. 

Josh graduated from Duke University, where he majored in economics, and from the University of Chicago Law School. He lives in Denver, but remains an active member of the State Bar of Texas.

GianCarlo Canaparo is a legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Canaparo researches and writes on criminal justice reform, immigration, the role of the courts, and various constitutional issues.

In addition to Heritage publications, Canaparo’s analysis has appeared in Fox News, The National Review, The Washington Times, and Law360. 

Canaparo joined Heritage in 2019 after serving for two years as a law clerk to a federal district court judge. Before his clerkship, he spent three years as an associate at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Canaparo holds a law degree from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Davis.

Ross Guberman is the president of Legal Writing Pro LLC and the founder of BriefCatch LLC. From Alaska and Hawaii to Paris and Hong Kong, Ross has conducted thousands of workshops on three continents for prominent law firms, judges, agencies, corporations, and associations. His workshops are among the highest rated in the world of professional legal education.

Ross holds degrees from Yale, the Sorbonne, and the University of Chicago Law School.

Ilya Shapiro is the 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 co-author of Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution (2014), and editor of 11 volumes of the Cato Supreme Court Review (2008-18). He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, and New York Times Online. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, including CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision and Telemundo, the Colbert Report, PBS NewsHour, and NPR.

Shapiro has testified before Congress and state legislatures and has filed more than 300 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs in the Supreme Court, including one that The Green Bag selected for its “Exemplary Legal Writing” collection. 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 Law School. He is also the chairman of the board of advisors of the Mississippi Justice Institute, and a member of the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 2015, National Law Journal named him to its 40 under 40 list of “rising stars.”

Before entering private practice, Shapiro clerked for Judge E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School (where he became a Tony Patiño Fellow).

Tiffany currently is an Associate at the appellate firm Consovoy McCarthy PLLC. She assists clients with a variety of litigation and appellate matters that encompass constitutional law, administrative law, and commercial litigation.

Before joining the firm, she was a law clerk to Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She previously served as a Legal Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, where she researched and wrote about the courts, judicial nominations, and various constitutional issues. She also co-hosted Heritage's SCOTUS 101 podcast. She earned her B.A. magna cum laude in Politics from Hillsdale College, and her J.D. from the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

David Rosenthal is an Associate in the Firm’s White Collar Defense & Government Investigations Practice Group. Prior to joining Brown Rudnick, David served as a Law Clerk to the Honorable Joel M. Carson III, US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; the Honorable Benjamin J. Beaton, US District Court of the Western District of Kentucky; and the Honorable James A. Teilborg, US District Court of the District of Arizona. Previously, he was a visiting legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation where he wrote legal memoranda and articles on criminal law and federal regulatory issues.

While at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, David was a symposium editor for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and marketing manager of the Arizona Law Review. He was a member of the Order of the Coif.

Megan was previously an advisor in the Office of White House Counsel and counsel to Senator Charles E. Grassley, then chairman of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. She also served as senior advisor to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she advised on litigation matters, including appeals, and on financial services, consumer protection, and health care regulations.

Megan was a law clerk to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh of the United States Supreme Court, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Sidney Fitzwater of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Sherif was previously a Research Scholar at the Witherspoon Institute. He is a 2008 Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Princeton, from which he went on to earn a master’s degree in moral, political, and legal philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, then a PhD in philosophy from Princeton, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He is coauthor of two books: What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (2012) and Debating Religious Liberty, Tolerance, and Bigotry (2017). Sherif was a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito of the United States Supreme Court and Judge Thomas Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.