The Honorable Clint Bolick – Associate Justice, Arizona Supreme Court
Before joining the Goldwater Institute in 2007, Bolick was co-founder of the Institute for Justice and later served as president of the Alliance for School Choice.
Bolick helped author the Health Care Freedom Act and the Save Our Secret Ballot amendment, which were added to the Arizona Constitution in 2010 and adopted in several other states. He also has assisted policy activists in several states to establish litigation centers based on the Goldwater Institute model.
In 2003, American Lawyer recognized Bolick as one of three lawyers of the year for his successful defense of school choice programs, culminating in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2009, Legal Times named Bolick one of the “90 Greatest D.C. Lawyers in the Past 30 Years.” Bolick received one of the freedom movement’s most prestigious awards, the Bradley Prize, in 2006 for advancing the values of democratic capitalism.
Bolick has authored several books, most recently Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold Over Economic Liberty (2011) and David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary (2007). In addition to his work at the Goldwater Institute, Bolick serves as a research fellow with the Hoover Institution.
The Honorable Mark Brnovich – Arizona Attorney General
Mark Brnovich was inaugurated as Arizona’s Attorney General in 2015. He previously served as Director of the Arizona Department of Gaming, as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona, and as an Assistant Attorney General with the state. He has also been a Judge Pro Tem of Maricopa County Superior Court, Deputy Maricopa County Attorney, Command Staff Judge Advocate in the U.S. Army National Guard, and Director of the Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute.
Brnovich is known for restoring public confidence in the office of “Arizona’s Top Cop” and for assembling some of the nation’s most talented public servants for his administration. He argued at the United States Supreme Court regarding voter redistricting, was featured on the CBS talk show 60 Minutes in defense of capital punishment, and appeared on Times Square’s billboards to combat human sex trafficking.
Most recently, he was honored by the National Federation of Independent Business as a “Champion of Small Businesses.”
Adam Feldman – Creator, Empirical SCOTUS
Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim – Executive Director for North America, Quilliam International
Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim is the Executive Director, North America for Quilliam International.
He is an expert on violent extremism issues and a scholar on Africa. Prior to his current role, he served as a Senior Program Officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he led their Horn of Africa program and served as an expert on violent extremism issues globally.
Dr. Fraser-Rahim’s areas of specialty are on transnational terrorist movements, Islamic intellectual history, Muslim communities in the West and Africa affairs. In addition, Dr. Fraser-Rahim worked for the United States Government for more than a decade for the Department of Homeland Security, Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counter-terrorism Center. There, he provided strategic advice and executive branch analytical support on violent extremism issues to the White House and the National Security Council, where he was the author or co-author of Presidential Daily Briefs and strategic assessments on extremist ideology.
Dr. Fraser-Rahim has conducted research in more than 40 countries on the African continent, and has worked and studied throughout the Middle East. He completed advanced level Arabic language certificates at various higher education institutions in the U.S., West Africa and the Middle East and he earned his Ph.D. in 2017 from Howard University in African Studies, with a focus on Islamic thought and on violent extremism issues.
Dr. Fraser-Rahim provided one of the first doctoral dissertations on the intellectual thought of African American Muslims and its nexus to the broader Islamic world using original primary sources in both Arabic and English. and focused on the American Muslim thinker, WD Mohammed, titled, ” The Making of American Islam and the Emergence of Western Islamic Intellectual Thought to Counter Violent Extremism: A Case Study of American Muslim Revivalist, Imam WD Mohammed (1933-2008.) Finally, he is also a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project.
Tyler Green - Utah Solicitor General
Tyler Green joined the Utah Attorney General’s Office as Solicitor General in August 2015 to oversee the Appellate Department after serving the United States Chamber of Commerce as Deputy Chief Counsel for Litigation in the Chamber’s Litigation Center. In this capacity Green worked with state Solicitors General on matters of national interest and was an integral part of a Chamber team that drafted and filed hundreds of amicus and merits briefs over the past several years.
Prior to his service at the U.S. Chamber, Green was an associate in the Supreme Court and Appellate section of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP’s Washington, D.C. office where he gained substantive experience in Supreme Court and other appellate and trial litigation.
Green also previously served as a law clerk at the United States Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. Green came highly referred by the National Association of Attorneys General’s Supreme Court Coordinator, federal jurists from district courts to the Supreme Court as well as multiple AG Offices of other states.
A native Utahn, Green attended Jordan High School where he led the Beetdiggers to a 4-A State Championship in football while earning All-State honors himself. He earned both his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Utah. At the College of Law, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Utah Law Review and graduated Order of the Coif and first in his class.
Adam Gustafson - Partner, Boyden Gray & Associates
Adam Gustafson is a partner at Boyden Gray & Associates where he has represented States, federal judges, environmental groups, biofuel producers, agricultural interests, and public policy organizations, on such issues as the constitutional separation of powers, the First Amendment, automotive regulations, environmental computer models, healthcare regulation, and judicial deference to federal agencies.
Mr. Gustafson received his J.D. in 2009 from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, a managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and an executive editor of the symposium issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Mr. Gustafson served as a Vice President of the Yale Law School Federalist Society. He was a Coker Fellow, and his legal writing won the Joseph A. Chubb Competition Prize and the Edward D. Robbins Memorial Prize.
Mr. Gustafson graduated with high distinction in 2005 from the University of Virginia, where he was an Echols Scholar, a member of the Raven Society, a member of the rowing team, and a Lawn resident.
Before joining Boyden Gray & Associates, Mr. Gustafson was an associate at Cooper & Kirk, where he specialized in appellate litigation. Mr. Gustafson served as a law clerk to Judge Richard R. Clifton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Erik Jaffe - Partner, Schaerr Jaffe LLP
Erik Jaffe has been involved in appeals on a broad range of legal issues, including First Amendment challenges to campaign finance reform, Commerce Clause challenges to Health Care Reform and other federal legislation, Equal Protection Clause challenges to affirmative action in education, First Amendment challenges to school vouchers, Fifth Amendment challenges to takings of property, Second Amendment challenges to restrictions on gun ownership, and a wide variety of cases involving patents, copyrights, ERISA, securities fraud, federal preemption, environmental regulation, and other state and federal constitutional and statutory matters. He has represented businesses and non-profit groups, Judges, Senators, former government officials, Nobel Prize winners, and a broad cross-section of private individuals. Mr. Jaffe has been involved in over 100 Supreme Court matters, including filing 30 cert. petitions, representing half-a-dozen parties on the merits, and filing over 60 amicus briefs at both the cert. and merits stages.
A 1990 graduate of the Columbia University School of Law, Mr. Jaffe was a law clerk to Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1990 to 1991. Following that clerkship he spent five years in litigation practice with the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly. In the summer of 1996 he left Williams & Connolly to clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. At the end of that clerkship he started his own practice, and he was a sole practitioner from 1997 to 2018. He joined the firm in 2018.
Elbert Lin – Partner, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP
Elbert Lin is a Partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP in Washington, D.C. With experience in the private sector and multiple branches of government, Elbert’s practice has spanned a wide range of issues, including major questions of constitutional and administrative law at the federal and state levels. On behalf of more than two dozen states, he won a stay from the US Supreme Court of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Described by the New York Times as an “unprecedented” order, the stay was the first time the Supreme Court had ever put a regulation on hold before review by a federal appeals court. In that same case, Elbert argued before the en banc DC Circuit in an historic proceeding that one commenter compared to “the NBA All-Star Game” (E&E News 2016). At the state level, Elbert recently led the effort that persuaded the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals to overturn an injunction of the state’s right-to-work law.
In 2013, Elbert was appointed the Solicitor General of West Virginia. During his four-and-a-half year tenure, Elbert served as a member of the Attorney General’s senior management team, oversaw all civil and criminal appeals, and argued nearly two dozen cases in federal and state appellate courts. He authored more than twenty-five briefs in the US Supreme Court and more than forty-five formal Opinions of the Attorney General.
Earlier in his career, Elbert was a partner in the appellate and communications litigation groups of a national law firm and served as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the US Department of Justice’s Civil Division, where he received a Special Service Award. He has also been a law clerk at all three levels of the federal judiciary: for Justice Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court; for Judge William H. Pryor Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit; and for Senior Judge Robert E. Keeton on the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
Elbert speaks regularly on a wide variety of topics, including constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, state and federal relations, the US Supreme Court, and appellate practice. He has testified before Congress, and has spoken at the national conventions of the American Bar Association, the Association of Corporate Counsel, the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, the Federalist Society, Americans for Prosperity, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Cleta Mitchell – Partner, Foley & Lardner LLP
Cleta Mitchell is a partner and political law attorney in the Washington, D.C. office of Foley & Lardner LLP, and a member of the firm’s Political Law Practice. With more than 40 years of experience in law, politics and public policy, Ms. Mitchell advises nonprofit and issue organizations, corporations, candidates, campaigns, and individuals on state and federal campaign finance law, election law, and compliance issues related to lobbying, ethics and financial disclosure. She practices before the Federal Election Commission, the ethics committees of the US House and Senate and similar state and local enforcement bodies and agencies. She has testified before Congress on numerous occasions related to election law, campaign finance and lobbying and ethics laws, and is a frequent speaker and guest commentator on political law. She served as co-counsel for the National Rifle Association in the Supreme Court case involving the 2002 federal campaign finance law.
Ms. Mitchell has extensive experience on the federal lobbying and ethics law and in 2008, she authored The Lobbying Compliance Handbook, published by Columbia Books, Inc.
Ms. Mitchell was a teaching fellow at the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1981 and was the Shapiro Fellow at the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University in 2001.
Ms. Mitchell was a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976-1984 where she chaired the House Appropriations and Budget Committee. She received her B.A. (high honors, 1973) and J.D. (1975) from the University of Oklahoma.
Tyler O’Neil – Assistant Editor, PJ Media
Jeremy Tedesco – Senior Counsel and Vice President of U.S. Advocacy and Administration, Alliance Defending Freedom
Jeremy Tedesco serves as senior counsel and vice president of U.S. Advocacy and Administration for Alliance Defending Freedom, where he helps oversee the implementation of strategic initiatives and advocacy campaigns.
Since joining ADF in 2004, Tedesco has litigated cases protecting religious liberty, free speech, and the sanctity of human life. He was co-counsel in Reed v. Town of Gilbert at the U.S. Supreme Court, where he successfully defended the free speech rights of a small church against government discrimination. From 2015 to 2017, Tedesco directed the ADF Center for Conscience Initiatives, where he specialized in protecting the freedom of conscience of individuals being unjustly forced to compromise their beliefs or else face heavy fines and punishment. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which the Supreme Court will consider, he has argued that the government cannot coerce a Christian cake artist to design a wedding cake that communicates a message with which he fundamentally disagrees. Tedesco has also led pre-enforcement challenges to laws that would likewise compel creative professionals to promote messages contradicting their core beliefs. These include Telescope Media Group v. Lindsey, Amy Lynn Photography v. City of Madison, and Brush & Nib Studio v. City of Phoenix.
Numerous media outlets have interviewed Tedesco or published his comments. They include Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Times, PBS, NPR, and National Review, among others.
Tedesco earned his Juris Doctor in 2004 from the Regent University School of Law, where he was a recipient of West’s Academic Achievement Award. He is a member of the state bar of Arizona, admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Arizona, as well as multiple federal district and appellate courts.
Misha Tseytlin – Partner, Troutman Sanders LLP
Misha has extensive experience litigating high-stakes appeals before the United States Supreme Court, Federal Courts of Appeal and State Supreme Courts.
Misha leads the firm's national appellate and Supreme Court practice. He is an experienced, nationally-renowned appellate advocate, having successfully led several of the most high-profile appeals in the country in recent years. He argued and prevailed before the United States Supreme Court in Gill v. Whitford, one of the most significant redistricting cases in decades. He also argued and prevailed before the United States Supreme Court in Murr v. Wisconsin, a high-stakes regulatory takings case.
Misha has been one of the leaders in high-profile challenges to environmental regulations. He was one of the key advocates in the Clean Power Plan litigation, playing a critical role in securing a historic stay from the United States Supreme Court, and arguing the case before the en banc D.C. Circuit. Misha played a similar leading role in the multistate challenges to the WOTUS Rule and multiple challenges to EPA’s ozone rules.
Before joining Troutman Sanders, Misha was Wisconsin Solicitor General from 2015 to 2018. Before that, he served as General Counsel in the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office. Misha also had several federal clerkships, including for the Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. Misha graduated from Amherst College, B.A., magna cum laude, 2003, and Georgetown University Law Center, J.D., summa cum laude, 2006.