Leadership
Academic Committee
Janet Halley, Co-chair
Eli Goldston Chair of Law, Harvard University
Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and writes about family law, anti-trafficking, the regulation of sexual misconduct from international criminal law to Title IX, and the slavery legacy of her Chair. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton, 2006), and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy (Duke, 1999). She coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique with Wendy Brown (Duke, 2002) and After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory with Andrew Parker (Duke, 2011), and solo-edited Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law. With Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché, and Hila Shamir, she has published Governance Feminism: An Introduction (Minnesota 2018) and Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (Minnesota, 2019). She holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and has taught at Hamilton College, Stanford Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the Tel Aviv University Buchman Faculty of Law, and the Law Department of the American University of Cairo.
Lucas E. Morel, Co-Chair
John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics, Washington and Lee University
Lucas E. Morel is the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics and Head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. Prof. Morel also teaches in the Master’s Program in American History and Government at Ashland University in Ohio; lectures in summer programs for the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy; and conducts high school teacher workshops for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, John M. Ashbrook Center, Jack Miller Center, Bill of Rights Institute, and Liberty Fund. Prof. Morel is the author or editor of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government, Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages, Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man, and The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. His most recent book is Lincoln and the American Founding, published in 2020 for the Concise Lincoln Library Series of Southern Illinois University Press. Prof. Morel is a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society; former president of the Abraham Lincoln Institute; a consultant on the Library of Congress exhibits on Lincoln and the Civil War; was a member of the scholarly board of advisors for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission; and currently serves on the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which will plan activities to commemorate the founding of the United States of America. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont Graduate University.
Lara Buchak
Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
Lara Buchak is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Her book Risk and Rationality (2013) concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. It vindicates the ordinary decision-maker from the point of view of even ideal rationality. A significant upshot of her view is that individuals with different attitudes towards risk—considered as different ways to weight worse scenarios against better ones—can all be rational. Her research following the book has focused on applications of her view to ethics, arguing that we ought to defer to individuals’ risk-attitudes in biomedical research; that we ought to weight worse scenarios very heavily in setting climate policy; and that we ought to care a great deal about the interests of the worse-off when acting ethically. Another ongoing project is on the nature and rationality of faith, both in the religious and mundane sense. She argues that faith requires stopping one’s search for evidence and making a commitment–and maintaining one’s commitment in the face of counterevidence. She details when such faith is rational, and how it is beneficial to human life. Other topics she has written on include group decision-making; the relationship between assigning probability to a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis outright; and the nature of free will. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. She spent 12 years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley before returning to Princeton.
Donald Downs
Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Affiliate Professor of Law, and Journalism Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Donald Downs is the Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science Emeritus, and the Affiliate Professor of Law, and Journalism Emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University. In addition, he was the director and co-founder of the University’s Wisconsin Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy (2007-present), and director of the University’s Legal Studies Program and its Center for the Study of Law, Society, and Justice (2004-7). He was president (and former secretary) of the independent and non-partisan faculty group, the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights, one of the nation’s leading campus academic freedom and free speech groups (secretary 1996-2000, president since 2000-2016). His scholarship has dealt with a wide range of issues dealing with such issues as freedom of speech; academic freedom; American politics; political thought; political and legal movements; citizenship; campus politics; domestic violence, psychiatry, and the criminal law; and the relationship among the military, the university, and civic education. His prize-winning books include Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment; The New Politics of Pornography; More than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law; Cornell `69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University; Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus; and Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education on Non-Military Students (Cambridge University Press). He is a co-editor with Chris W. Surprenant (Philosophy, University of New Orleans) of The Value and Limits of Academic Speech (Routledge, 2018), and author of the forthcoming book, Free Speech and the Intellectual Polis: Liberal Education and the Prospect of Liberal Democracy. He has been an active defender of academic freedom on campus (where he serves as the president of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights, an independent group) and in the nation. In 2013, Downs received the national Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award for his defense of academic freedom and freedom of thought at University of Wisconsin-Madison and in higher education generally. He is also the faculty founder and advisor to the University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society. Since retiring, Downs has been the lead faculty advisor to the Free Speech and Open Inquiry Project of the Institute for Humane Studies in Washington, D.C.
Robert P. George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has frequently been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law, among other works. His writings have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the Columbia Law Review, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He was an undergraduate at Swarthmore and holds the degrees of M.T.S. and J.D. from Harvard University and D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.
Anna Krylov
Professor of Chemistry, University of Southern California
Alejandro W. Rodriguez
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, Director, Program in Materials Science and Engineering, Princeton University
Alejandro Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and the Director of the Program in Materials Science and Engineering at Princeton University. His research focuses on nanophotonics, the study of light in structured media, where he is known for his contributions to computational and mathematical methods and to the understanding of quantum fluctuations, nonlinear optics, and nanophotonic devices. He was recently awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award, and the Department of Energy Frederick A. Howes Award in Computational Science. He has Bachelors and PhD degrees in Physics from MIT and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.
David M. Rabban
Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Texas at Austin School of Law
David Rabban is the Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. He served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983. He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012. His teaching and research focus on free speech, higher education and the law, and American legal history. He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history. He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for “the best book in intellectual history published in 1997.” His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere. He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2016 and of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2016-17. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University and his JD from Stanford University School of Law.
Keith E. Whittington
William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University
Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. 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, Georgetown University Law Center, and Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, among other outlets, and he is a regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog. He is the author of several books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech and Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.
Legal Advisory Council
Thomas C. White, Chair
Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Thomas C. White is a partner in Sullivan and Cromwell’s Litigation Group. He represents leading global companies and individuals in complex commercial litigation, including securities class actions, products liability actions, bankruptcy litigation, arbitration, and government investigations. He has represented some of the world’s leading corporations, financial institutions and industry organizations, including Goldman Sachs, Volkswagen, California Resources Corp., Barclays, Cytec, Giants Stadium, the New York Bankers Association, The Clearing House, Popular, Swiss Re and UBS. AmLaw Litigation Daily recognized Tom as “Litigator of the Week” in May 2019 and November 2020. Super Lawyers has named Tom a “Rising Star” in New York.
Floyd Abrams
Senior Counsel, Litigation Practice Group, Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP
Lisa Blatt
Partner, Williams & Connolly LLP
Lisa Blatt serves as Chair of Williams & Connolly’s Supreme Court and Appellate practice. Lisa has argued 40 cases before the United States Supreme Court, prevailing in 37. The National Law Journal has called her a “visionary” and one of “the 100 most influential lawyers in America.” Bloomberg has described her as a “legendary high court litigator” while The National Journal likewise has referred to her as a “SCOTUS legend.” Lisa’s appellate work has been highlighted by multiple publications and has earned her rankings in Chambers USA, Benchmark Litigation, The Legal 500, and Washingtonian magazine. In 2020, Benchmark Litigation selected Lisa as one of the “Top 10 Women in Litigation” in the United States. Lisa has argued and briefed numerous appeals on a wide range of business law issues in federal and state courts of appeal. As The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported, the Supreme Court selected Lisa’s case as the first telephonic argument in history, and the first case where live audio was available to the public, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office v. Booking.com.
Martin Boles
Kirkland & Ellis
Martin Boles is Of Counsel at Kirkland & Ellis, where he was a litigation partner for 25 years in Los Angeles. His most recent trial was against the United States Department of Justice in the Deepwater Horizon Litigation. He is on the Board of Directors of Christendom College and is past President of the Board of Directors of St. Monica Academy, an independent classical school in Glendale, California, where he also teaches 12th grade American History. Martin graduated Phi Beta Kappa Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College in 1980 with a degree in geology and did mineral exploration for Kennecott Corporation from 1979 to 1982. He received his JD and MBA degrees from Stanford University in 1986.
Darrell Cafasso
Partner, Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP
Darrell Cafasso is a partner in the litigation group of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, where he represents leading financial services firms and public companies in critical company matters. Over the years, Darrell has represented financial institutions, corporations and individuals in the areas of securities and banking law, consumer financial products, product liability and general commercial litigation. He also represented corporate clients in numerous criminal and regulatory investigations, including before the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Department of Financial Services and various state attorneys general. Before joining Orrick, Darrell served as the Global Head of Litigation and Regulatory Proceedings at Goldman Sachs. Earlier in his career, Darrell was a partner in the litigation group of Sullivan &; Cromwell LLP. Darrell served as a judicial law clerk in the US Court of Appeals, 3rd Circuit, for the Hon. Leonard I. Garth and for the US District Court, District of New Jersey, for the Hon. John C. Lifland. Darrell earned an AB in Economics from Princeton University in 1999 and a JD from Columbia Law School in 2002, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.
Paul D. Clement
Partner, Clement & Murphy, PLLC
Paul Clement served as the 43rd Solicitor General of the United States from June 2005 until June 2008. Before his confirmation as Solicitor General, he served as Acting Solicitor General for nearly a year and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General for over three years. Paul has argued more Supreme Court cases since 2000 than any lawyer in or out of government. He has also argued many important cases in the lower courts, including Walker v. Cheney, United States v. Moussaoui, and NFL v. Brady. Following law school, Paul clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, he went on to serve as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights. Paul is a Distinguished Lecturer in Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he has taught in various capacities since 1998. He also serves as a Senior Fellow of the Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute.
Elizabeth Cosenza
Associate Professor and Area Chair, Law and Ethics, Fordham University
Elizabeth Cosenza is an Associate Professor of Law and Ethics at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University and Chair of the Law and Ethics Area. She earned her JD from Harvard Law School, serving as senior editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. A former Truman Scholar from New York and Rhodes Scholar district finalist, Professor Cosenza entered into private practice at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP upon graduation from Harvard Law School. Her practice areas included securities law, capital markets and mergers and acquisitions. At Fordham, Professor Cosenza teaches Legal Framework of Business, Business Law I, Securities Law, and Survey of the Law. In addition to her current role as Chair of the Law and Ethics Area at Fordham, she previously served on the Gabelli School’s Executive Committee and as the Secretary of the Gabelli School Council. The New York Law Journal selected Professor Cosenza as one of its Rising Stars—an elite group of attorneys under age 40 who “have established a record of accomplishments and demonstrated that they are top contributors to the practice of law and their communities.” Recently, Professor Cosenza was named by Poets & Quants as one of the Best Undergraduate Business School Professors (2020).
Justin J. DeCamp
Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Justin J. DeCamp is a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell’s Litigation Group. Mr. DeCamp’s practice focuses on the representation of financial institutions in securities litigation and regulatory investigations. He has represented clients in a broad range of litigation in federal and state courts and in government and self-regulatory organization investigations in the United States and abroad, including under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and relating to complex structured financial products. He also has represented clients in commercial and securities arbitrations, contractual and merger disputes, and matters involving tax, investment company, antitrust, corporate succession, and constitutional issues. Justin is co-author of Bank Litigation, Chapter 68 of Commercial Litigation in New York State Courts (West, 4th Ed., 2015) and Super Lawyers recognized Justin in 2014 and 2015 for his work in New York.
Jeannie Suk Gersen
John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard University
Jeannie Suk Gersen is the John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, family law, and the law of art, fashion, and the performing arts. Before joining Harvard’s faculty in 2006, she served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court, and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was educated at Yale (B.A. 1995), at Oxford (D.Phil 1999) where she was a Marshall Scholar, and at Harvard Law School (J.D. 2002), where she was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. She has written three books and many articles in scholarly journals and general media. Her book, At Home in the Law, was awarded the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize for the best law and society book of the year. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of Harvard Law School’s Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a Contributing Writer to The New Yorker.
Mike Marcucci
Partner, Jones Day
Mike Marcucci is a partner in the Boston office of Jones Day. He is a trial lawyer focused on complex commercial and corporate disputes, including ERISA, bankruptcy, shareholder rights, securitized financial products, and breach of fiduciary duty. He also serves as a Director of the Abigail Adams Institute, and was previously a Trustee of the Montrose School (2003-2015) and St. Benedict Classical Academy (2014-2017). He was an elected member of the Board of Selectmen in Medfield, Massachusetts from 2016-2022, and currently serves as Chairman of the Town’s Affordable Housing Trust.
The Honorable Regina Clark McGranery
Retired Judge
Regina C. McGranery served as an administrative appeals judge with nationwide jurisdiction for more than thirty years. She did so as a member of the Benefits Review Board (BRB), U.S. Department of Labor. Previously, Judge McGranery served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Although she conducted more than forty jury trials in federal and local courts, her concentration was in appellate work. Issues raised included constitutional arguments, sex and race discrimination, and questions of first impression. Judge McGranery began her legal career as law clerk to the Honorable Edward M. Curran, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She earned a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and a B.A. in English with magna cum laude honors from Trinity College, Washington, D.C. In addition to publishing articles in the Federal Bar News & Journal, and the Federal Communications Bar Journal, she has served on the Board of Trustees of her alma mater, Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, Bethesda, MD.
Gerard E. Mitchell
Partner, Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP
Gerard E. Mitchell is Partner at Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers (1988 – present). In 2020 he was named one of SuperLawyers top 100 lawyers in Washington, DC. He served as President of the Trial Lawyers Association of Metropolitan Washington, D.C. from 1978-1979. He is President of the Youth Leadership Foundation (since 2011), and is a Trustee of The Catholic University of America (since 2018). He is a Board Member of The Catholic Information Center (2012 – present), and has served as Board Member of The Heights School (1982 – 2011). He taught as an Adjunct Professor at the American University School of Law from 1974-1975. He earned his LL.B. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1969, and his B.A. from Georgetown University in 1966.
Nadine Strossen
John Marshall Harlan II Professor Emerita, New York Law School; former national President, American Civil Liberties Union
Nadine Strossen has written, taught, and advocated extensively in the areas of constitutional law and civil liberties, including through frequent media interviews and Congressional testimony. From 1991 to 2008, she served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Professor Strossen is currently a Senior Fellow of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and a member of the Advisory Boards of the ACLU, Heterodox Academy, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the University of Austin. When she stepped down as ACLU President, three (ideologically diverse) Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell and tribute luncheon: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter. The National Law Journal has named Strossen one of America’s “100 Most Influential Lawyers,” and several other publications have named her one of the country’s most influential women. Her many honorary degrees and awards include the American Bar Association’s prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award. Strossen’s 2018 book HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship was selected by Washington University and Washburn University as their “Common Reads” in 2019 and 2022, respectively.
Stephen T. Whelan
Partner, Blank Rome LLP
Stephen T. Whelan is a partner in the New York office of law firm Blank Rome LLP and a lecturer in the Princeton University Politics Department. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, he is a member of the Advisory Council of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, a trustee of Fraunces Tavern Museum in Lower Manhattan, and the author of three books on law. He lives in New York City.
AFA Senior Staff
Howard L. Muncy
Director of Operations
Howard Muncy is Director of Operations for the Academic Freedom Alliance. Howard has experience in the collegiate classroom as a Lecturer in the Politics Department at Princeton University during the fall of 2020 and as an adjunct instructor for the History Department at Eastern Kentucky University in the years prior to his position with the AFA. Overall, he has twenty years of teaching experience, having taught American history at the secondary level before becoming a teacher for the collegiate classroom. Born and raised in southeastern Kentucky, he has served as President of the Kentucky Association of the Teachers of History, as a board member for KCSS, and is currently the Vice-President of Hanlon Advisors. He writes for Public Discourse, an online publication that seeks to enhance the public understanding of the moral foundations of free societies. He was recipient of a James Madison Memorial Fellowship in 2016. Howard has earned graduate credit through continuing education programs at Oxford University, Georgetown University, and received an M.A. in History from the University of Louisville.
David R. Oakley
Counsel
David R. Oakley is a partner at Anderl & Oakley, P.C., in Princeton, NJ. He is a Certified New Jersey Criminal Trial Attorney and a member of the C.J.A. Panel for the U.S. District Court, District of New Jersey. Prior to starting Anderl & Oakley, David was an associate at Collier, Jacob & Mills and served as a Law Clerk to the Honorable Samuel D. Lenox, Jr., A.J.S.C. In addition to representing clients in the State and Federal courts, David is a member of a number of legal and charitable organizations. He is a trustee of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey, legal consultant to El Centro de Recursos para Familias of Catholic Charities of Trenton, trustee and litigator for the Legal Center in Defense of Life, a research fellow at the Center for Thomas More Studies (University of Dallas), and a visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. David is a graduate of Columbia University and received his law degree from Georgetown University.
Learn More About the Academic Freedom Alliance
Individuals at academic institutions should not fear suppression or retaliation for teaching, writing, or speaking. We encourage you to join the movement in supporting the flourishing of intellectual life and the pursuit of knowledge and truth at institutions of higher learning.