Keynote Speaker: Jeffrey Rosen
President and CEO of the National Constitution Center
Rosen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Constitution Center, the first and only nonprofit, nonpartisan institution devoted to the most powerful vision of freedom ever expressed: the U.S. Constitution. He is a professor at The George Washington University Law School, where he has taught since 1997. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he explores issues involving the future of technology and the Constitution.
Rosen is a highly regarded journalist whose essays and commentaries have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, on National Public Radio, and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the 10 best magazine journalists in America and a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times called him “the nation’s most widely read and influential legal commentator.”
He is also the author of several books including The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America; The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America; The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age; and The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. His most recent book, as co-editor, is Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change.
Conference Speakers:
Tabatha Abu El-Haj
Associate Professor of Law, Thomas R. Kline School of Law, Drexel University
Professor Abu El-Haj has written extensively about the right of peaceable assembly, among other things. Currently, her work focuses on the freedom of association. Professor Abu El-Haj's publications include "The Neglected Right of Assembly," in the UCLA Law Review, and “Changing the People: Legal Regulation and American Democracy," in the New York University Law Review.
Abu El-Haj received her doctorate in Law and Society from New York University. She received her JD from New York University School of Law, where she was a Furman Fellow and graduated Order of the Coif. In 2005-2006, Abu El-Haj clerked for the Honorable Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Adam Bonica
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
Professor Bonica is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research focuses on ideology, campaign finance and interest groups politics. His main dissertation project developed a new methodology for measuring the ideology of political actors using campaign finance records. He is currently using the measures to examine the extent to which recent developments in campaign finance have contributed to partisan polarization. Bonica received his Ph.D from New York University. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.
Conor M. Dowling
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Mississippi
Professor Dowling is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. His research and teaching interests are in American Politics, where he studies both mass and elite political behavior with a substantive focus on issues of electoral competition, representation, and public policy. Recent publications include Super PAC! Money, Elections, and Voters After Citizens United (2014; with Michael Miller).
Michael Franz
Associate Professor of Government, Bowdoin College
Professor Franz is Associate Professor and Chair of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, as well as the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. He has written extensively on campaign advertising and interest groups in American politics. His most recent book is Political Advertising in the United States (2016; with Travis Ridout and Erika Franklin Fowler).
Richard L. Hasen
Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science, University of California, Irvine
Professor Hasen is Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation (named one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal in 2013), and is co-author of a leading casebook on election law.
His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law Blog, which the ABA Journal named to its “Blawg 100 Hall of Fame” in 2015. His newest book, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections, was published in 2016 by Yale University Press.
Michael S. Kang
Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law
Professor Kang (Ph.D., Harvard University) joined the Emory University law faculty in 2004. His research focuses on issues of election law, voting and race, shareholder voting, and political science. His work has been published by the Yale Law Journal, NYU Law Review, and Michigan Law Review, among others. Kang also serves as co-editor of the book series Cambridge Studies in Election Law and Democracy and co-authored a chapter for the first book in the series, "Race, Reform, and Regulation of the Electoral Process.
Ryan Pevnick
Associate Professor of Politics, New York University
Douglas Spencer
Associate Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Connecticut Law School
Professor Spencer is an Associate Professor with appointments in both the law school and the department of public policy. His research interests include the empirical study of public law, campaign finance, voting rights, and election administration. He teaches Constitutional Law, Election Law, and the Introduction to Public Policy course in the Master of Public Administration program at UConn.
Spencer's research has been published, or is forthcoming, in the Columbia Law Review, Californiat Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, University of Illinois Law Review, Journal of Law & Courts, and the Election Law Journal. His work has also been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate and other media outlets.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
Associate Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law
Professor Torres-Spelliscy is a Brennan Center Fellow and an Associate Professor of Law at Stetson University College of Law. She is the author of Safeguarding Markets from Pernicious Pay to Play: A Model Explaining Why the SEC Regulates Money in Politics. Prior to joining Stetson’s faculty, she was Counsel in the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She was an associate at Arnold & Porter LLP and a staffer for Senator Richard Durbin. Torres-Spelliscy has testified before Congress, and has helped draft legislation and Supreme Court briefs. As well as publishing in the Montana Law Review, University of San Francisco Law Review and the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy, and chapters in books, she has been published in the New York Times, New York Law Journal, Boston Review, Business Week, Forbes, The Atlantic, USA Today, The Hill, Huffington Post, Judicature, Salon, and CNN.com. In 2013, Torres-Spelliscy was named as a member of the Lawyers of Color's "50 Under 50" list of minority law professors making an impact in legal education. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
Panel Commentators:
Corey Brettschneider
Professor, Department of Political Science, Brown University
John Griffin
Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of Colorado at Boulder
Adam Hosein
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder
Helen Norton
Professor of Law and Associate Dean, University of Colorado School of Law
Jennifer Wolak
Associate Professor, Political Science Department, University of Colorado at Boulder