About Free Speech For People

Ben Binswanger is a member of the Free Speech For People Board of Directors. He has held senior leadership positions in the government, business, and nonprofit sectors. Mr. Binswanger began his career as a political consultant for numerous Democratic candidates, and worked for more than five years as Senator Edward Kennedy’s senior political advisor in Washington.

After serving as the senior communications officer at Telespectrum Worldwide, a publicly traded direct marketing company, Mr. Binswanger joined America Online, Inc. (AOL) in 1999 as vice president for corporate communications. At AOL, he managed a variety of communications projects for Steve Case and other executives, launched the company’s first employee intranet, and then managed AOL and Time Warner’s employee giving and volunteer programs after the merger of the two companies.

In 2003, Mr. Binswanger became the Chief Operating Officer of the Case Foundation, a private family foundation focused on supporting social innovators and investing in the integration of civic engagement and social media.  He later joined the Skoll Foundation as Vice President for Program and Impact, managing a team dedicated to advancing the work of later stage social entrepreneurs from around the globe.

Mr. Binswanger has also served on the boards of Demos, the National Voting Rights Institute, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement and Network for Good.

John Bonifaz is a constitutional attorney and the Co-Founder and President of Free Speech For People.  Mr. Bonifaz previously served as the executive director and general counsel of the National Voting Rights Institute, an organization he founded in 1994, and as the legal director of Voter Action, a national election integrity organization. He has been at the forefront of key voting rights and democracy campaigns in the United States for more than three decades.

Mr. Bonifaz’s work has included: pioneering a series of court challenges, applying political equality principles, that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time; helping to lead key election protection cases across the country; and helping to lead historic legal challenges, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to insurrectionists seeking to run for re-election.  He is the co-author with former American University Law Professor and now-Congressman Jamie Raskin of two seminal law review articles (Yale Law & Policy Review-1993 and Columbia Law Review-1994) and of The Wealth Primary: Campaign Fundraising and the Constitution (1994), which all argue that the current campaign finance system violates the Equal Protection rights of non-wealthy candidates and voters. Mr. Bonifaz is the co-author with Ron Fein and Ben Clements of The Constitution Demands It: The Case For The Impeachment of Donald Trump, published by Melville House in 2018, with a foreword by John Nichols.

Mr. Bonifaz is also the author of Warrior-King, published by Nation Books in 2004, with a foreword by the late Congressman John Conyers, Jr., which chronicles the 2003 case, in which he served as lead counsel, challenging the US military invasion of Iraq as illegal under the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution.  Mr. Bonifaz has also served as co-counsel in international human rights and environmental litigation, including litigation to hold the Chevron-Texaco oil company accountable for its widespread destruction of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Mr. Bonifaz is a 1992 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Ben Clements serves as Chairman of Free Speech For People; Chair of the Board’s Legal Committee; and Free Speech For People’s Senior Legal Advisor.  Mr. Clements is an attorney, author, and advocate for political and governmental reform and the founder of the Boston firm Clements Law.  Mr. Clements has been an attorney in the private and public sectors for more than thirty years and his expertise includes constitutional law, criminal law, civil rights law, business law, campaign finance, elections law, and government ethics.  His clients have included victims of discrimination, victims of fraudulent business and financial practices, business executives and professionals, senior government officials, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, non-profit organizations, and the state and federal governments.

Before founding Clements Law, Mr. Clements practiced at a large Boston law firm, co-founded two boutique litigation firms, served as a federal prosecutor, and served as the first Chief Legal Counsel to Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick.

Mr. Clements is a member of the board and a legal advisor to the anti-gun violence organization, Stop Handgun Violence, and a member of the advisory committee to the Boston Lawyers Chapter of the American Constitution Society.  He has also worked closely and collaborated with a variety of other legal and advocacy organizations, including Common Cause of Massachusetts and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.  Mr. Clements previously served as the Chair of the Massachusetts Governor’s Task Force on Public Integrity, a bi-partisan committee that led to landmark legislation overhauling the state ethics, lobbying, and campaign finance laws.

Mr. Clements graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College and summa cum laude from the Cornell Law School.  Following law school, he served as a law clerk for the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Dr. Joia Mukherjee is a member of the Free Speech For People Board of Directors. Dr. Mukherjee is a physician, clinical researcher, and educator trained in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and public health at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Division of Global Health Equity and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She founded and directs the Masters in Medical Science in Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mukherjee mentors residents in the Global Health Equity program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and fellows from Children’s Hospital and other Harvard teaching hospitals.  She teaches infectious disease, global health delivery, and human rights to health professionals and students from around the world. She is the author of Introduction to Global Health Delivery: Practice, Equity, Human Rights, a textbook published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. Dr. Mukherjee’s academic scholarship focuses on the treatment of HIV, TB, mental health and the strengthing of health systems in impoverished settings.  She is also a sought after teacher in human rights.

Since 2000, Dr. Mukherjee has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Partners In Health, an international medical charity with programs in the United States, Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Peru, Mexico, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Navajo nation.  As Chief Medical Officer of PIH, Joia coordinates and supports PIH’s efforts to provide high quality, comprehensive health care to the poorest and most vulnerable. She advises various grassroots organizations throughout the world and has consulted for the World Health Organization and other international agencies on health systems strengthening, human resources for health, the treatment of HIV, and the treatment of drug resistant tuberculosis in impoverished settings. She has won numerous awards for her teaching and health delivery work, and holds four honorary degrees. Dr. Mukherjee is an activist, singer, and mother who believes the world can and must change.

Deborah Hayes Stone serves as the Treasurer of Free Speech For People’s Board of Directors.  Ms. Hayes Stone is a clinical psychologist who received her BA from Brown University in Comparative Literature, and PsyD in Child-Clinical Psychology from Yeshiva University.  She has a private practice in the Boston metro-west area in which she sees adults and teens.

In addition to serving on Free Speech For People’s Board of Directors, Ms. Hayes Stone also serves on the Board of Trustees of Partners In Health, an international non-profit organization working in settings of poverty around the world to build health systems and provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.  As a Trustee of Partners In Health, Ms. Hayes Stone is engaged with the organization’s mental health work in Haiti, Rwanda, and across its other sites.  Further, Ms. Hayes Stone serves on the Board of Poetry in America, a new public television series and multi-platform digital initiative that brings poetry into classrooms and living rooms around the world.

John Bonifaz is a constitutional attorney and the Co-Founder and President of Free Speech For People.  Mr. Bonifaz previously served as the executive director and general counsel of the National Voting Rights Institute, an organization he founded in 1994, and as the legal director of Voter Action, a national election integrity organization. He has been at the forefront of key voting rights and democracy campaigns in the United States for more than three decades.

Mr. Bonifaz’s work has included: pioneering a series of court challenges, applying political equality principles, that have helped to redefine the campaign finance question as a basic voting rights issue of our time; helping to lead key election protection cases across the country; and helping to lead historic legal challenges, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to insurrectionists seeking to run for re-election.  He is the co-author with former American University Law Professor and now-Congressman Jamie Raskin of two seminal law review articles (Yale Law & Policy Review-1993 and Columbia Law Review-1994) and of The Wealth Primary: Campaign Fundraising and the Constitution (1994), which all argue that the current campaign finance system violates the Equal Protection rights of non-wealthy candidates and voters. Mr. Bonifaz is the co-author with Ron Fein and Ben Clements of The Constitution Demands It: The Case For The Impeachment of Donald Trump, published by Melville House in 2018, with a foreword by John Nichols.

Mr. Bonifaz is also the author of Warrior-King, published by Nation Books in 2004, with a foreword by the late Congressman John Conyers, Jr., which chronicles the 2003 case, in which he served as lead counsel, challenging the US military invasion of Iraq as illegal under the War Powers Clause of the US Constitution.  Mr. Bonifaz has also served as co-counsel in international human rights and environmental litigation, including litigation to hold the Chevron-Texaco oil company accountable for its widespread destruction of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Mr. Bonifaz is a 1992 cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and a 1999 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Oske Buckley is the Director of Administration and Finance for Free Speech For People. Ms. Buckley has served as the Administrative Assistant for Voter Action. Prior to joining Voter Action, Ms. Buckley worked as the Development Associate and Administrative Associate for the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri, where she managed the organization’s donor database, engaged in event planning, coordinated and supervised volunteers, and carried out numerous administrative responsibilities. Ms. Buckley received her BA from Hendrix College in 2005, MPA from Evergreen State College in 2013, and holds a Certified Nonprofit Accounting Professional (CNAP) certificate.

Lisa Chang (she/her) is the Director of Development at Free Speech For
People. Ms. Chang’s previous positions have been dedicated to raising funds
and building partnerships on behalf of institutions that advance social and
political progress for people who face systemic inequities. She attended the
University of Texas at Austin for her undergraduate studies and received her
Master’s in Communication from the University of Washington – Seattle.
Additionally, Ms. Chang has over 15 years of experience as an anti-racism
facilitator and has consulted organizations in strategic planning and change
management. She has served on the Board of Directors at The League of
Women Voters (LWV) of Austin Area, Vice President of LWV Seattle-King
County, and on the Board of Directors for LWV of Washington State.

Edward Erikson is a Communications Consultant for Free Speech For People. He is the Founder and President of Erikson Communications Group.  Mr. Erikson specializes in the integration of social, earned and paid media across all platforms in order to tell stories, engage people and advance issues. He has been featured in CNN, Politico, Huffington Post, TechPresident, Bill Moyers and other outlets. He has taught courses in Political Theory, American Political Thought, Media and Politics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and was the recipient of the 2012/2013 Distinguished Teaching Award. He received his MA in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University.

Alexandra Flores-Quilty is the Campaign Director for Free Speech For People. Ms. Flores-Quilty previously served as the Executive Director of By the People, a pro-democracy grassroots campaign that organized to impeach and remove Donald Trump from office. Ms. Flores-Quilty got her start in organizing as a student when she served as Chair of the Oregon Student Association (OSA) where she was a part of winning instate tuition for undocumented Oregonians and developing OSA’s electoral program that broke records around the country in voter registration and turnout. Later she served as the elected President of the US Student Association (USSA) where she worked with Senator Bernie Sanders’s office to introduce federal legislation for free higher education and organized the 2015 Million Student March. Ms. Flores-Quilty was a co-founder of #AllofUs, that built political power behind progressive candidates. Ms. Flores-Quilty is a Lead Trainer at the Momentum Training Institute where she has trained and supported social movements in the US and around the world.

Susan Greenhalgh is the Senior Advisor on Election Security for Free Speech For People. Ms. Greenhalgh has previously served as vice president of programs at Verified Voting and at the National Election Defense Coalition, advocating for secure election protocols, paper ballot voting systems and post-election audits. Recognized as an expert on election security, she has been invited to testify before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and has been an invited speaker at meetings of the MITRE Corporation, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Mid-West Election Officials Conference, the International Association of Government Officials, the Election Verification Network and the E-Vote-ID conference in Bregenz, Austria. She is a frequent source for reporters from TheNew York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, USAToday, Associated Press, National Public Radio and other leading news outlets. She has appeared on CNN and MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, and various other television news shows. She has a BA in Chemistry from the University of Vermont.

Rosemary Hamington (she/her) is the Administrative and Development Associate for Free Speech For People.  Ms. Hamington has a Masters in Music from the University of Illinois and a B.M. from Western Washington University.  After hurricane Harvey hit in Houston, she decided to focus more on helping her community.  This is why she started volunteering at the Houston Food Bank as a Data Entry Assistant for their donor services department.  She also served an AmeriCorps term of 1,700 hours as Volunteer Engagement Specialist with Tacoma/Pierce County Habitat for Humanity in the Seattle area.  Some highlights of this role were conducting volunteer orientations, and planning volunteer appreciation events, week-long volunteering trips for college students nationwide, and a film series with discussions about affordable housing.  Her other administrative experience includes working for H&R Block as a Client Service Professional.

Courtney Hostetler is the Legal Director for Free Speech For People. From September 2019-April 12, 2024, Ms. Hostetler served as FSFP’s Senior Counsel. Previously, Ms. Hostetler served as staff attorney for South Coastal Counties Legal Services, where she helped low-income clients recover damages for wage theft and employment discrimination, and obtained special education services for traumatized children. Ms. Hostetler also worked at Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLC and ACLU Massachusetts, where she focused on eliminating discriminatory discipline practices in public schools. Prior to attending law school, Ms. Hostetler managed the Close Up Foundation’s national youth voting program and worked as a research analyst for the Genocide Intervention Network. Ms. Hostetler clerked for the Honorable James L. Dennis of the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Ms. Hostetler graduated with a J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.Phil from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Colgate University.

Amira Mattar is the Counsel for Free Speech For People. Previously, she served as Staff Attorney for Manhattan Legal Services, where she challenged displacement of low-income communities and advocated for safe housing conditions. She sat as the Michael Ratner Justice Fellow at Palestine Legal prior to Legal Services, where she challenged surveillance and suppression of Palestine human rights advocates.

During law school, Ms. Mattar focused on supporting systemically-targeted communities. She helped survivors of violence apply for visas with the Immigrant Families Advocacy Project, advocated on behalf of incarcerated individuals in detention centers with the International Human Rights Clinic, and was liaison to the Washington State Supreme Court Minority and Justice Commission. Ms. Mattar later joined the Law, Societies and Justice Department of University of Washington as a graduate student where she taught social studies courses. Ms. Mattar graduated with a J.D. and B.A. from University of Washington.

Albert Alschuler graduated magna cum laude from the Harvard Law School and was Case Editor of the Harvard Law Review. He has been a law clerk to Justice Walter V. Schaefer of the Illinois Supreme Court; a special assistant to the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division of the U.S. Justice Department; a professor of law at the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern University; a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, the Brooklyn Law School, Columbia University, NYU, and the University of San Diego; and a visiting scholar at the National Institute of Justice and the American Bar Foundation.

Lawrence Anderson practices law in Great Falls, Montana, concentrating in the areas of complex torts, insurance claims practices and class litigation. Mr. Anderson is an advocate member of the Montana Trial Lawyers Association (MTLA) and a member of the Leader’s Forum of the American Association of Justice (AAJ). He represents Montana on AAJ’s Board of Governors. Mr. Anderson has served on MTLA’s Board of Directors since 1997 and has served as its President. He has chaired MTLA’s Amicus Committee since 2000. Mr. Anderson wrote and filed amicus briefs in the Montana Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States in Montana’s challenge to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. He earned his law degree from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1974.

Professor David Ciepley came to the University of Denver in 2007. Professor Ciepley publishes in the fields of democratic theory, liberal theory, and corporate theory. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (Uppsala), and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC), among other residential fellowships, and has been a Fulbright scholar at McGill.

He is the author of Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (2006), “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation” (APSR 2013), “Neither Persons nor Associations: Against Constitutional Rights for Corporations” (The Journal of Law and Courts, September 2013), and “Is the US Government a Corporation? The Corporate Genesis of Modern Constitutionalism” (APSR 2017). His current book project, Democracy and the Corporation, recovers the corporate roots of the democratic constitutional state and analyzes the changing relationship between this state and the business corporation over time.

Professor Ciepley was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis from 2002-2004, a postdoctoral fellow at The Center on Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia from 2004-2005, and a postdoctoral fellow in political philosophy, policy, and law, also at the University of Virginia, from 2005-2007. He graduated cum laude with a BA from Princeton University in 1989, received an MSc from Edinburgh University in 1991, an MA with distinction from the University of Chicago in 1992, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2002.

John Coates is the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, where he also serves as Deputy Dean and Research Director of the Center on the Legal Profession. Professor Coates served as General Counsel and as Acting Director for the Division of Corporation Finance for the SEC. Before joining Harvard, he was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, specializing in financial institutions and M&A. At HLS and at HBS, he teaches corporate governance, M&A, finance, and related topics. He has testified before Congress, advised the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the New York Stock Exchange, and served as the Chair of the Investor-as-Owner Subcommittee of the Investor Advisory Committee of the SEC.

Professor Coates’s most recent publication is The Problem of Twelve: When a Few Financial Institutions Control Everything.

James G. Exum, Jr. is the Distinguished Professor of the Judicial Process at Elon University School of Law. He served on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1975-1994, and was Chief Justice from 1986-1994. In 1996 he returned to the practice of law at Smith Moore Leatherwood LLP where he led the appellate practice group, supervising and assisting lawyers with appeals in state and federal courts. Justice Exum was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives in 1967 and that same year began service as Resident Superior Court Judge in Guilford County, NC, holding that position until being elected to the state Supreme Court in 1974. During his service with the North Carolina Supreme Court, Justice Exum wrote 402 opinions for the court and 208 concurring or dissenting opinions. As a lawyer, he has helped brief and argued more than 40 appeals in state and federal appellate courts. Justice Exum is a Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. He has served in the House of Delegates of the American Bar Association as Chairperson of the ABA Criminal Justice Standards Committee, and as State Chair of the ABA Foundation. He has been active in the North Carolina Bar Association, serving in the 1980s as co-chair of its Commission on Alternate Dispute Resolution and most recently as co-chair of its Committee on Judicial Independence. Justice Exum is a founding member of the Elon University Law School Advisory Board and served as Distinguished Jurist-in-Residence at Elon Law from 2006 to 2012. He is the recipient of the North Carolina Bar Association’s Judge John J. Parker Award for conspicuous service to the cause of jurisprudence; the North Carolina ACLU’s Frank Porter Graham Civil Liberties Award and the American Judicature Society’s Herbert Harley Award for contributing to the improvement of the administration of justice in North Carolina. He earned a B.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a J.D. at New York University.

Caroline Fredrickson served as the President of the American Constitution Society from 2009–2019, where she helped grow ACS, which now has lawyer chapters across the country, student chapters in nearly every law school in the United States, and thousands of members throughout the nation. In addition to serving as a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, Ms. Fredrickson has joined Georgetown Law as a Visiting Professor.

Ms. Fredrickson has published works on many legal and constitutional issues and is a frequent guest on television and radio, including serving as a regular on-air commentator on impeachment.  In addition, she regularly contributes opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.  She is also the author of Under The Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over, The Democracy Fix: How to Win the Fight for Fair Rules, Fair Courts, and Fair Elections, and most recently, The AOC Way.

Before joining ACS, Ms. Fredrickson served as the Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office and as General Counsel and Legal Director of NARAL Pro-Choice America. In addition, she served as the Chief of Staff to Senator Maria Cantwell, of Washington, and Deputy Chief of Staff to then-Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, of South Dakota. During the Clinton Administration, she served as Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs.

Ms. Fredrickson is currently an elected member of the American Law Institute, co-chair of the National Constitution Center’s Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board, a member of If/When/How’s Advisory Board, and on the boards of American Oversight and the National Institute of Money and Politics. In 2015 Fredrickson was appointed a member of the Yale Les Aspin Fellowship Committee.

Ms. Fredrickson received her J.D. from Columbia Law School with honors and her B.A. from Yale University in Russian and East European Studies summa cum laude, phi beta kappa. She clerked for the Hon. James L. Oakes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Lisa Graves is executive director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group that works with journalists and other researchers to shine a bright light on the dark money fueling regressive agendas targeting vital institutions in our republic, such as our courts and public schools.

Graves is one of the nation’s foremost experts in exposing how special interests distort public policy and try to thwart the public’s interest in a thriving and inclusive democracy.

She served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Policy Development/Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice. She also worked as the senior legislative strategist for the ACLU on national security and civil liberties, and held other posts.

Graves has given testimony before several congressional committees, and she has helped shape the national debate about the culture of corruption on the U.S. Supreme Court, GOP efforts to undermine the U.S. Postal Service, and the role of right-wing operatives and funders like Leonard Leo, Barre Seid, Harlan Crow, Charles Koch, Dick Uihlein, Rob Arkley. Graves also launched the award-winning ALECexposed.org investigation, KochDocs and other projects.

Her op-eds have been published by the New York Times, the Guardian, TIME, Slate and others.She has been a frequent guest on MSNBC and has also appeared on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNBC, the BBC and other networks.

From 2009-2017, she led the Center for Media and Democracy, and she is the president of its board of directors. She also serves on the board of trustees of the Park Foundation and on the board of directors of the Public Concern Foundation and U.S. Right to Know.

Graves earned a JD from Cornell Law School and a BS in political science from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

Daniel J. H. Greenwood, Professor of Law, came to Hofstra from the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, where he held the position of S.J. Quinney Professor of Law. He received his A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College and pursued graduate studies in political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for two years. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating, Daniel Greenwood clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Richard Owen in New York and then joined the litigation section of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York City.

Professor Greenwood’s research interests lie in the structure and rights of business organizations and other artificial and natural groups; the intersection of democratic theory and corporate law; and problems of group rights in an individualist democracy. He has published numerous law review articles, book chapters and popular opinion pieces on corporate law, corporate speech rights, and the role of corporations in politics, as well as on minority religious rights and related topics. His pro bono and litigation work has included authoring a Supreme Court brief in the Vermont campaign reform case.

Professor Greenwood currently teaches courses in corporate finance, business organizations and torts. He has also taught constitutional law II (civil and political rights), commercial law, not-for-profit organizations, comparative law, corporate income tax, and seminars on advanced corporate law, Jewish law, groups and the law, and the Federalist Papers.

Thomas Joo is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, specializing in corporate governance, contract law, white collar crime, and critical race theory. Prior to joining the UC Davis faculty, Professor Joo was a clerk in the chambers of the Honorable Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York.

He is a member of the American Law Institute and is the former chair of the Section on Contracts of the Association of American Law Schools. Professor Joo is the author of numerous works on corporate governance and corporate law, including the book, Corporate Governance: Law, Theory, and Policy, published in 2004 by Carolina Academic Press with a second edition published in 2010. He received his B.A. from Harvard College and his J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Liz Kennedy is the Director of Democracy and Government Reform at American Progress. Previously, she served as counsel and campaign strategist at Demos, working on voting rights, money in politics, and corporate accountability. She worked to expand political participation by eliminating barriers to voting and empowering voters; to increase transparency and accountability for money in politics to fight corruption of democratic government; and to fulfill America’s promise of political equality. Kennedy has authored or co-authored numerous papers, such as “Automatic Voter Registration: Finding American’s Missing Voters,” “Top 5 Ways Citizens United Harms Democracy & Top 5 Ways We’re Fighting to Take Democracy Back,” “Millions to the Polls: Practical Policies to Fulfill the Freedom to Vote for All Americans,” “The Racial Equity Impact of Secret Corporate Political Spending by Government Contractors,” “Bullies at the Ballot Box: Protecting the Freedom to Vote Against Wrongful Challenges and Intimidation,” “Stop the Next Citizens United: McCutcheon v. FEC and the Crisis of Confidence in American Democracy,” “Democracy at Stake: Protecting Democracy in the Super PAC Era,” and “Citizens Actually United: The Bi-Partisan Opposition to Corporate Political Spending and Support for Common Sense Reform.”

Prior to joining Demos, Kennedy was an attorney in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, working on issues of money in politics and democratic accountability. Kennedy was deputy director of voter protection for President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in Ohio; has represented unions in industrial bankruptcy cases; and was a litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP. Before law school, she spent several years running campaigns as a student organizer and canvass director with the Public Interest Research Group.

Robert Kerr is a professor at Gaylord College. Kerr’s First Amendment research focuses on legal and public-policy issues involved in maintaining a truly free marketplace of ideas for citizens in an age when corporate and government voices have grown more powerful than ever. His secondary research agenda focuses on media narratives influential in shaping the course of sports-media history. He was the most honored participant over the first decade of this millennium in national research competitions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, a 2010 Musambira and Nesta study documented.

Kerr teaches Media Law and Media History at OU. Gaylord College students have twice voted him recipient of the Gaylord College Teaching Award. He has been named a Presidential Professor by OU and the winner of the National Communication Association’s Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression. He was the keynote speaker at the 2019 Oklahoma County Bar Association’s annual Law Day Banquet.

Among his four scholarly books, The Corporate Free-Speech Movement: Cognitive Feudalism and the Endangered Marketplace of Ideas (2008), foreshadowed the 2008 economic crisis in global markets, as well as the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that removed virtually all limits on corporate media spending in political-candidate campaigns. His How Postmodernism Explains Football, and Football Explains Postmodernism (2015) received the Communication and Sport Division’s Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association in 2017. His work has been honored in ten national research competitions.

Cyrus Mehri has served as co-lead class counsel in some of the largest and most significant race and gender cases in U.S. history, including, Roberts v. Texaco Inc., Ingram v. The Coca-Cola Company, Robinson v. Ford Motor Company and many others. Trial Lawyers for Public Justice named Mr. Mehri a finalist for “Trial Lawyer of the Year” in 1997 and 2001 for his work on the Texaco and Coca-Cola matters, respectively. In 2010, Mr. Mehri co-founded Voices for Corporate Responsibility, a project designed to create a home for senior executives and professionals concerned about corporate wrongdoing and who seek to rectify those wrongs before Congress, regulators, and the Courts. The Securities and Exchange Commission relied in significant part on a written submission by Voices in finalizing its whistleblower rules in the landmark Dodd-Frank legislation.

Mr. Mehri also co-founded Working Ideal, which provides innovative strategy and ideas to organizations trying to reach the next level of equal opportunity.

Mr. Mehri graduated from Cornell Law School in 1988. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable John T. Nixon, U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Tennessee.

Robert A.G. Monks is Chairman and Co-Founder of ValueEdge Advisors.  He is a globally respected author and pioneering practitioner in corporate governance. Mr. Monks was the founder and president of Institutional Shareholder Services, Inc., now the leading corporate governance consulting firm, advising shareholders with assets in excess of $1 trillion on how to vote their proxies. He founded the investment fund known as LENS, which since 1992 developed the “institutional activist” mode of investment. Mr. Monks is an advisor to Trucost, the environmental research company. He is also the founder of Lens Governance Advisors, a law firm that advised on corporate governance in the settlement of shareowner litigation. Mr. Monks served as the President of Henley Management College’s Center for Board Effectiveness from 2000 to October 2003. He also served as the board chairman of Governance for Owners.

He is a graduate of Harvard College, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School. He was a partner in a Boston law firm and served as vice president of Gardner Associates, an investment management company. He was president and chief executive officer of C.H.Sprague & Son Company, a coal and oil concern and served as a board member and chairman of the Board of The Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company and the Boston Company. He served as director of the United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation through appointment by President Reagan, who also appointed him one of the founding Trustees of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System. He served in the Department of Labor as Administrator of the Office of Pension and Welfare Benefit Programs having jurisdiction over the entire U.S. pension system. Mr. Monks has served as a member of the board of directors of ten publicly held companies.

Mr. Monks has co-authored three books with Nell Minow including, Power and Accountability (Harper Business, 1991), Corporate Governance (Blackwell Publishing, 1995), the 5th edition was published in spring 2011, and Watching the Watchers (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). He wrote The Emperor’s Nightingale (Capstone, April 1998), The New Global Investors: How Shareowners Can Unlock Sustainable Prosperity Worldwide (Capstone, May 2001) andCorpocracy (Wiley, 2007).  With Alexandra Lajoux he wrote Corporate Valuation for Portfolio Investment (Wiley, 2011).  He also co-authored Trusting Harvard: The Cost of Unprincipled Investing (Miniver Press, 2014) with Marcy Murninghan. Mr. Monks was also the subject of a biography chronicling the corporate governance movement – A Traitor to His Class – by Hilary Rosenberg published by Wiley in 1999.  Mr. Monks’ first novel, Reel and Rout, was published by the Brook Street Press, February 2004.

Mr. Monks has received a number of awards and accolades in the course of his distinguished career, including but not limited to:

• 2013 Frankel Fiduciary Prize from the Institute for Fiduciary Standard
• 2008 Directorship 100 Hall of Fame Award from the Directorship Magazine
• 2007 Outstanding Financial Executive Award
• 2004 Special Award for Corporate Accountability from the Investor Relations Magazine
• 2002 International Corporate Governance Award from the ICGN
• 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from ICGN

Jim Nelson served as a Justice on the Montana Supreme Court from May 1993 until January 2013.  He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in business (cum laude) from the University of Idaho in 1966 and his Juris Doctor degree, cum laude, from George Washington University in 1974.  Prior to serving on the Court, Jim engaged in the general practice of law in Cut Bank, Montana for nearly 20 years, representing individuals, small businesses, ranchers and farmers in domestic relations, real estate, litigation, contract, wills probate, estate and oil and gas matters.  Additionally, he served as the Glacier County Attorney for 14 of those years.  Jim was active in numerous community affairs and organizations and served the State of Montana in various capacities including as a member and chairman of the State Board of Oil and Gas Conservation and as a member of the State Gaming Advisory Council and the Governor’s Advisory Council on Corrections and Criminal Justice Policy.

While on the Supreme Court Jim served on a number of Commissions including chairing the Court’s Commission on Technology and acting as liaison to the Commission on Courts of Limited Jurisdiction.  Jim was a member of the State Bar of Montana CLE Institute and one of Montana’s Commissioners on the Uniform Laws Commission. He presently serves as a member of the legal advisory committee of Free Speech for People.org. Jim taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Montana School of Law (Alexander Blewett III School of Law) in 2000 and in 2013.

Jim has always been an outspoken advocate for civil rights and for a fair, impartial and independent judiciary. He is the recipient of the Montana Trial Lawyers Public Service Award, 2013; the Montana American Civil Liberties Janette Rankin Award, 2013; and the American Bar Association Stonewall Award, 2014.

Civil rights attorney Eva Jefferson Paterson is Co-Founder and Former President of the Equal Justice Society, a national strategy group focused on reclaiming the 14th Amendment and its Constitutional safeguards against discrimination. She previously served 13 years as Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. At the Lawyers’ Committee, she was part of a broad coalition that filed the groundbreaking anti-discrimination suit against race and gender discrimination by the San Francisco Fire Department. That lawsuit successfully desegregated the department, winning new opportunities for women and firefighters of color. Ms. Paterson is co-chair of the California Civil Rights Coalition (CCRC), which she co-founded and previously chaired for 18 years. She also served as Vice President of the ACLU National Board for eight years, and chaired the boards of Equal Rights Advocates and the San Francisco Bar Association Foundation. Ms. Paterson has received numerous awards, including the Fay Stender Award from the California Women Lawyers; Woman of the Year from the Black Leadership Forum; the Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award from the ACLU of Northern California; and the Alumni Award of Merit from Northwestern University. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she received her B.A. in political science and was elected the first African American student body president, and U.C. Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Peter A. Pease conducts a litigation practice from offices in Lincoln, MA. Mr. Pease was a founding partner of Berman DeValerio & Pease in Boston, MA in 1982. He has spent more than 30 years litigating cases for violations of the federal securities and antitrust laws, and state unfair trade practices claims. His effective advocacy has elicited favorable judicial comment in courts throughout the nation. He has served as lead counsel in many securities fraud class actions, prevailing in claims against companies in the automotive, biotech, banking, energy, high tech, internet, medical equipment and devices, software, telecommunications and other industries. He has led many successful prosecutions of accounting firms and investment bankers. Mr. Pease is a director of Bay Cove Human Services, Inc., and served as board chair in the years 2006 through 2010. Bay Cove serves more than 12,000 individuals and their families each year at more than 80 different program sites, providing treatment for mental illness, developmental disabilities, addiction disorders, homelessness, early intervention learning programs and services for seniors. Mr. Pease received his J.D. from Suffolk University Law School.

Katie Redford is the Executive Director of The Equation Campaign. Katie is a lawyer with expertise in human rights, climate justice and corporate accountability, who is credited with spearheading legal strategies to hold corporations accountable for human rights and environmental abuses around the world.

Prior to her current role, Katie was a founding director of EarthRights International, where she spent 25 years building the NGO that trains and litigates on behalf of communities harmed by corporate human rights and environmental abuses, and defends environmental defenders from retaliatory corporate abuse.

Katie received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1995 to establish EarthRights and has since been recognized as an Ashoka Global Fellow, a Rockwood Leadership Fellow and a Bellagio Resident Fellow.  She has received numerous awards and has been profiled in a variety of media including the books Be Bold and Your America: Democracy’s Local Heroes, and the award-winning documentary film Total Denial.

Katie has published in legal, human rights and environmental journals, and is the co-author of The Revolution Will Not Be Litigated.  She has served on a variety of nonprofit boards, as well as an adjunct professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and the Washington College of Law. Katie is a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court and the Massachusetts state bar, and a graduate of Colgate University and the University of Virginia School of Law.

Bertrall Ross joined the law faculty on the University of Virginia School of Law in 2021. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, constitutional theory, election law, administrative law and statutory interpretation.

Ross’ research is driven by a concern about democratic responsiveness and accountability, as well as the inclusion of marginalized communities in administrative and political processes. His past scholarship has been published in several books and journals, including the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review and the University of Chicago Law Review.  Two of his articles were selected by the Yale/Harvard/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum.

Prior to joining the Virginia faculty, Ross taught at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he received the Rutter Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also been awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, the Princeton University Law and Public Affairs Fellowship, the Columbia Law School Kellis Parker Academic Fellowship and the Marshall Scholarship. Ross is currently serving on the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court.

Ross earned his undergraduate degree in international affairs and history from the University of Colorado, Boulder; his graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs; and his law degree from Yale Law School. After law school, he clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Myron Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama.

Catherine Ross is the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. She specializes in constitutional law (with particular emphasis on the First Amendment) and family law. Professor Ross’ book A Right to Lie? Presidents, Other Liars, and the First Amendment (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published in November 2021 and has been featured at events at the Cato Institute, the National Constitution Center and other venues. Her last book, Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights (Harvard University Press, 2015) was named the Best Book on the First Amendment by Concurring Opinions’ First Amendment News; it also won the Critics’ Choice Book Award from the American Education Studies Association. Professor Ross is a co-author of Contemporary Family Law (West Academic), First Edition (2006) through the latest Fifth Edition (2019).

In 2015-2016, she was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 2008-2009. In 2015-2016 Professor Ross was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Boston College (where she held joint appointments in the School of Education and the History Department) and St. John’s School of Law in New York.

An elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Professor Ross was the primary author of the ABA’s landmark report on America’s Children at Risk (1993) (with the Hon. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.) and is former chair of the ABA’s Steering Committee on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children. She has served on a wide variety of ABA committees.  Professor Ross is a former chair of the Section on Law and Communitarianism of the Association of American Law Schools.

She holds her BA, PhD (in History), and JD from Yale University where Professor Ross was a member of the first class of women to graduate from Yale College.

Before attending Yale Law School, she was on the faculty of the Yale Child Study Center (Medical School) and the Bush Center on Child Development and Social Policy at Yale.

Prior to entering legal academia, Professor Ross was a litigator at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, where she won major impact litigation on behalf of the city’s homeless population.

Dale Rubin is a Professor of Law at Appalachian School of Law. Prior to joining ASL, Professor Rubin taught for seven years at the Willamette College of Law in Salem, Oregon. His primary research interest is the constitutionality of public subsidies to private corporations. Professor Rubin was in private practice for eighteen years, serving at Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe in San Francisco and with the office of Carl B. Metoyer in Oakland, California. He was an International Legal Center Fellow in Barbados, West Indies, where he drafted a model corporations code and published an article on the development of an anti-trust law framework in the English-speaking Caribbean territories. He has published articles in the Journal of World Trade Law, the Anglo-American Law Review, the St. Louis University Public Law Review, the University of Richmond Law Review, the University of Toledo Law Review, the Idaho Law Review, Northern Kentucky Law Review, the Urban Lawyer, the American Bar Association’s State and Local Government Section Newsletter and the Oregon State Bar Business Law Digest. Professor Rubin has also authored numerous state-based think-tank papers that have been published by the James Madison Institute (Florida), Cascade Policy Institute (Oregon), Calvert Institute for Policy Research (Maryland), Independence Institute (Colorado), Washington Institute for Policy Studies (Washington), and Sutherland Institute (Utah). He has been editor of the Charles Houston Bar Association Newsletter in Oakland, California, the Oregon State Bar Business Law Digest, the American Bar Association Public Transportation Newsletter, and is presently the editor of the ABA State and Local Government Section Newsletter. Professor Rubin’s publications include: “Corporate Personhood: How The Courts Have Employed Bogus Jurisprudence To Grant Corporations Constitutional Rights Intended For Individuals,” 28 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 523 (2010).

Professor Rubin received a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in psychology from Stanford University. He was a world record holder in the 440-yard relay and an All-Coast football player at Stanford. He was also the founder of the Stanford Black Alumni Association.

James Gustave Speth joined the faculty of the Vermont Law School as Professor of Law in 2010. Professor Speth served also as Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos and Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute. In 2009 Professor Speth completed his decade-long tenure as Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. From 1993 to 1999, Professor Speth was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality (Carter Administration); and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council. Throughout his career, Professor Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation and promote sustainable development. Among Professor Speth’s awards are the National Wildlife Federation’s Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America’s Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Environmental Law Institute and the League of Conservation Voters, and the Blue Planet Prize. Professor Speth is the author, co-author or editor of seven books. His latest book is America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy, published by Yale Press in September 2012. Professor Speth currently serves on the boards of the New Economy Coalition, Center for a New American Dream, Climate Reality Project, and the Institute for Sustainable Communities. He is an honorary director of the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council and is an advisory board member or associate for the Democracy Collaborative, United Republic, 350.org, EcoAmerica, Labor Network for Sustainability, New Economy Working Group, SC Coastal Conservation League, Environmental Law Institute, Vermont Natural Resources Council, Southern Environmental Law Center, Heinz Center, Free Speech For People, and Vermont Institute for Natural Science. Professor Speth graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1964 with a BA in Political Science, and subsequently earned an M.Litt. in Economics from Oxford University in 1966 as a Rhodes Scholar and his JD from the Yale Law School in 1969. After law school, he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black.

Gerald Torres is Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School.

A pioneer in the field of environmental law, Torres has spent his career examining the intrinsic connections between the environment, agricultural and food systems, and social justice. His research into how race and ethnicity impact environmental policy has been influential in the emergence and evolution of the field of environmental justice. His work also includes the study of conflicts over resource management between Native American tribes, states, and the federal government.

Previously, Torres taught at Cornell Law School, the University of Texas Law School, and the University of Minnesota Law School, serving as an associate dean at both. He is also a former president of the Association of American Law Schools and served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton administration.

Torres’s past work has examined how U.S. regulations have created racially or ethnically marginalized communities that bear a disproportionate share of environmental burdens and also has focused on developing strategies to improve governmental decision-making. He is also a leading scholar in critical race theory — a theoretical framework that examines questions of race and racism from a legal standpoint. His book The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, coauthored with Lani Guinier, was described as “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.”