About Us
Board of Advisors
NCLA’s Board of Advisors consists of legal, policy, academic and media luminaries from a broad spectrum of professional backgrounds. This 30-member bipartisan committee of retired federal judges, former public officials, attorneys, law professors, and communicators shares a deep commitment to advancing civil liberties for all people.
The Board of Advisors enhances the mission of NCLA by providing ongoing advice and counsel both collectively and individually to our staff and leadership regarding how best to protect constitutional freedoms from the Administrative State’s depredations.

Hon. Janice Rogers Brown
Hon. Janice Rogers Brown
Retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
and former Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court
Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (retired)
Judge Brown was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in June 2005. She earned her J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law and received a Master of Laws from the University of Virginia School of Law.
Brown served as a deputy in the Office of Legislative Counsel for the State of California, as a deputy attorney general in the California Attorney General’s Office, and as Deputy Secretary and General Counsel for California’s Business, Transportation and Housing Agency. After a short stint in private practice as a senior associate at the Sacramento law firm of Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, Judge Brown returned to government service in 1991 as the Legal Affairs Secretary to California Governor Pete Wilson. From 1994 to 1996, she served as an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal, Third Appellate District, and from 1996 to 2005, as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court.
Brown retired from the D.C. Circuit in 2017.
Randy Barnett
Randy Barnett
Professor of Law
Peter Berkowitz
Peter Berkowitz
Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Josh Blackman
Josh Blackman
Professor of Law and Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law
Josh Blackman is a national thought leader on constitutional law and the United States Supreme Court. Josh’s work was quoted during two presidential impeachment trials. He has testified before Congress and advises federal and state lawmakers. Josh regularly appears on TV, including NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the BBC. Josh is also a frequent guest on NPR and other syndicated radio programs. He has published commentaries in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and leading national publications.
Since 2012, Josh has served as a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. He holds the Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law. Josh has authored three books. His latest, An Introduction to Constitutional Law, was a top-five bestseller on Amazon. Josh has written more than five dozen law review articles that have been cited nearly a thousand times. Josh was selected by Forbes Magazine for the “30 Under 30” in Law and Policy. Josh is the President of the Harlan Institute, and founded FantasySCOTUS, the Internet’s Premier Supreme Court Fantasy League. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and tweets @JoshMBlackman.
Jennifer Braceras
Jennifer Braceras
Former Commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Hon. Susan G. Braden
Hon. Susan G. Braden
Retired Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims
Judge Susan G. Braden was appointed in 2003, by President George W. Bush, to the United States Court of Federal Claims which has exclusive jurisdiction over cases against the federal government arising from: breach of contract/false claims; bid protest; patent and copyright infringement; land, water, and certain environmental disputes. On March 13, 2017, she was designated as Chief Judge. Since her retirement from the federal bench, Judge Braden recently was designated as one of ten U.S. Arbitrators to resolve disputes arising under the USMCA (United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement) Treaty and has joined the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University as an Adjunct Professor in the Center For Intellectual Property Protection.
Mike Carvin
Mike Carvin
Retired Partner
In his 35 years at the Justice Department and in private practice, Mike Carvin is one of the leading appellate and trial lawyers challenging state and federal regulations on constitutional and statutory grounds, with 10 Supreme Court arguments and numerous high-profile victories. In addition to his numerous cases in the United States Supreme Court, he has argued in virtually every federal appeals court. His major cases include the recent constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act and the decisions invalidating Sarbanes-Oxley’s accounting board, preventing the Justice Department from obtaining monetary relief against the tobacco industry under RICO, overturning the federal government’s plan to statistically adjust the census, limiting the Justice Department’s ability to create “majority-minority” districts, and upholding Proposition 209’s ban on racial preferences in California.
Chuck Cooper
Chuck Cooper
Partner
Don Elliott
Don Elliott
Winter Doyle Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law
E. Donald Elliott has been a professor at Yale Law School since 1981, and now teaches part time as Distinguished Adjunct Faculty at the Antonin Scalia Law School. Professor Elliott has advised six presidential campaigns and teaches and writes in fields as diverse as administrative and constitutional law, civil procedure and energy and environment. He is the author or co-author of over 70 articles and seven books and writes regularly on popular legal topics for The American Spectator.
Professor Elliott also has practical experience as the head of the environmental and product stewardship practice groups at four large international law firms, including Covington & Burling LLP. He was appointed by President George Herbert Walker Bush, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, to serve as assistant administrator and general counsel of the EPA, 1989-1991. He was a law clerk to U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell, and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge David L. Bazelon.
Dan Gallagher
Dan Gallagher
Former Commissioner
Greg Jacob
Greg Jacob
Partner
Erika Jones
Erika Jones
Partner
Gary Lawson
Gary Lawson
Professor
Gary Lawson is the Philip S. Beck Professor at Boston University School of Law. He has authored or co-authored five books on constitutional history, constitutional theory, and jurisprudence; nine editions of an Administrative Law casebook; a Constitutional Law casebook; and more than one hundred scholarly articles. He is a founding member, and serves on the Board of Directors, of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and is an Associate Editor for the Heritage Guide to The Constitution. Professor Lawson twice clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, first at the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then at the United States Supreme Court. In between clerkships, he was an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel.
Julia Mahoney
Julia Mahoney
Professor
Roman Martinez
Roman Martinez
Partner
Roman Martinez is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Latham & Watkins. As a member of the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Practice, he focuses primarily on appeals in the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Courts of Appeals, and state appellate courts. Mr. Martinez has handled civil and criminal matters involving a wide range of constitutional, statutory, and administrative law issues, and he has argued cases in the Supreme Court and the D.C., Sixth, Ninth, and Federal Circuits, among other courts.
John O. McGinnis
John O. McGinnis
George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law
John O. McGinnis is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He is the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of the Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.
Jonathan Mitchell
Jonathan Mitchell
Mitchell Law PLLC
Elizabeth Papez
Elizabeth Papez
Partner
Roger Pilon
Roger Pilon
Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies
Roger Pilon is a senior fellow in the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, which he founded in 1989 and directed until 2019; the inaugural holder emeritus of Cato’s B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, Cato’s first endowed chair, established in 1998; and the publisher emeritus of the Cato Supreme Court Review, which he founded in 2001. He served also as Cato’s vice president for legal affairs, which he was named in 1999.
Prior to joining Cato, Pilon held five senior posts in the Reagan administration, including at the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice, and was a national fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In 1989, the Bicentennial Commission presented him with its Benjamin Franklin Award for excellence in writing on the U.S. Constitution.
Joseph Postell
Joseph Postell
Associate Professor of Politics
Glenn Reynolds
Glenn Reynolds
Professor
Glenn Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. His special interests are law and technology and constitutional law issues and his work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Columbia Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Wisconsin Law Review, the William and Mary Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Law and Policy in International Business, Jurimetrics, the Journal of Space Law, and the High Technology Law Journal. Professor Reynolds has also written in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, Road & Track, Urb and the Wall Street Journal as well as other popular publications. His most recent books are The Social Media Upheaval, The Judiciary’s Class War and The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.
Brian Richman
Brian Richman
Associate
Richard Samp
Richard Samp
Former Senior Litigation Counsel
Throughout his 40-year career in private law practice in Washington, D.C., Richard Samp has specialized in appellate litigation with a focus on constitutional law. He served as Chief Counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation for more than 30 years. He has participated directly in more than 200 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Samp is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School and clerked for a federal judge in Detroit.
David Schoenbrod
David Schoenbrod
Professor
David Schoenbrod is a Trustee Professor of Law at New York Law School. From 1972-79, Professor Schoenbrod served as one of the leaders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he campaigned to reduce lead in gasoline, resurrect the then-decrepit New York City subway, and protect the environment of Puerto Rico. Previously, he was Director of Program Development at the community development project that Senator Robert Kennedy established in Bedford Stuyvesant. He has also been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.
Dan Troy
Dan Troy
Former General Counsel
Eugene Volokh
Eugene Volokh
Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. Professor Volokh teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. Before coming to UCLA, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (6th ed. 2016), and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed. 2013), as well as over 90 law review articles. He is a member of The American Law Institute, a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog. His law review articles have been cited by opinions in eight Supreme Court cases and several hundred court opinions in total, as well as several thousand scholarly articles.
Peter Wallison
Peter Wallison
Senior Fellow Emeritus Financial Policy Studies
Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies and is co-director of AEI’s program on Financial Policy Studies. Prior to joining AEI, he practiced banking, corporate and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington, D.C., and New York. Mr. Wallison has held a number of government positions. From June 1981 to January 1985, he was General Counsel of the United States Treasury Department, where he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan Administration’s proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. During 1986 and 1987, Mr. Wallison was White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan, and between 1972 and 1976, he served first as Special Assistant to New York’s Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, as counsel to Mr. Rockefeller as vice president of the United States.
Rebecca Wood
Rebecca Wood
Partner
Rebecca Wood is co-leader of the firm’s Food, Drug and Medical Device practice, serves on Sidley’s Global Life Sciences Leadership Council, and leads Sidley’s Washington, D.C. Healthcare and FDA group.
Ms. Wood previously served as Chief Counsel (general counsel role) to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under former Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. At FDA, she worked on virtually every significant initiative addressed by the Commissioner and agency leadership. She was the principal legal advisor on major initiatives including efforts to streamline the drug and device development approval process, modernize the agency’s regulatory framework, combat addiction to opioids and nicotine, enhance the product safety and labeling of food and medical products, and address drug pricing. She also focused on First Amendment and preemption issues.