Hadley Arkes has been a member of the Amherst College faculty since 1966, and since 1987 he has been the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence. He has written five books with Princeton University Press: Bureaucracy, The Marshall Plan and the National Interest (1972), The Philosopher in the City (1981), First Things (1986), Beyond the Constitution (1990), and The Return of George Sutherland (1994). His most recent books have been with Cambridge University Press, including Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (2002), and Constitutional Illusions and Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law (2010). His articles have appeared in professional journals.  Apart from his writing in more scholarly formats, he has become known to a wider audience through his writings in the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and National Review. He has been a contributor also to First Things, a journal that took its name from his book of that title. 

He was the main advocate, and architect, of the bill that became known as the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act. Prof. Arkes first prepared his proposal as part of the debating kit assembled for the first George Bush in 1988. The purpose of that proposal was to offer the “most modest first step” of all in legislating on abortion, and opening a conversation even with people who called themselves “pro-choice.” Professor Arkes proposed to begin simply by preserving the life of a child who survived an abortion–contrary to the holding of one federal judge, that such a child was not protected by the laws. On August 5, President Bush signed the bill into law with Professor Arkes in attendance.

Professor Arkes has been the founder, at Amherst, of the Committee for the American Founding, a group of alumni and students seeking to preserve, at Amherst, the doctrines of  “natural rights” taught by the American Founders and Lincoln. That interest has been carried over now to the founding of a new center for the jurisprudence of natural law, in Washington DC: the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding, named for one of the premier legal minds among the American Founders.

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Daniel Mark is an assistant professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He teaches political theory, philosophy of law, American government, and politics and religion. There he is a faculty associate of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good, and he holds the rank of battalion professor in Villanova’s Navy Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He is on the Steering Committee for the Villanova Political Theology Project, and on the Graduate Committee of the Political Science Department. He has served as faculty adviser to the mock trial team, and mentor in Villanova’s Faith and Learning Scholars Program.

In 2017-18, Dr. Mark is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. In 2015-16, he was a Visiting Fellow, Department of Politics at Princeton University under the sponsorship of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Dr. Mark is Vice Chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was appointed in 2014 by Speaker John Boehner, and he was reappointed in 2016 by Speaker Paul Ryan. He has participated in USCIRF delegations to Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Vietnam, and published on international religious freedom in US News & World Report, Investor’s Business Daily, Foreign Affairs, The Hill, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He holds a BA, MA, and PhD from Princeton University. He wrote his dissertation under the direction of Professor Robert P. George on “Authority and Legal Obligation.” There, he participated in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the Penn-Princeton Bioethics Forum. He was also affiliated with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and served as coordinator of its Undergraduate Fellows Forum.

Dr. Mark is a Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, works with the Tikvah Fund in New York, and he has taught at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. Daniel has spoken at meetings of the Acton Institute, the US Military Academy/West Point, the American Enterprise Institute, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Love & Fidelity Network, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the James Wilson Institute, Opus Dei, and Chabad. In 2015, Daniel spoke at the World Meeting of Families, organized by the Catholic Church.  It drew 20,000 participants to Philadelphia. Recent appearances include speeches at Ave Maria University, Baylor University, Brigham Young University, Colorado Christian University, the University of Notre Dame, and the Mount Academy, the Bruderhof (Anabaptist) high school in upstate New York.  Before graduate school, Dr. Mark spent four years as a high school teacher in New York City, and he received the New Jersey Department of Education Commissioner’s Distinguished Teacher Candidate Award while earning his teaching certification.

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Serving as Deputy General Counsel of the United States Department of Homeland Security, Dr. R. Sohan Dasgupta is a CFIUS, national security, investigations, government contracts, and international law expert who is also interested in constitutional law and the federal courts, commercial law, administrative law, and diplomacy.  He also speaks publicly on intellectual diversity and academic freedom.  Dr. Dasgupta's contributions on U.S.-Asia, and particularly U.S.-India, partnership have appeared in Fortune, and his work on international law have appeared in various law reviews and think-tank briefs.  Dr. Dasgupta led a think tank's efforts to produce a draft Constitution of Tunisia, an effort that a wide range of experts lauded.  He also served as Special Counsel at the United States Department of Education.  Dr. Dasgupta is an adjunct professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School. 

Dr. Dasgupta earned his J.D. from the U.C. Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), and was elected to the Order of the Coif.  He earned his Ph.D. in international law from the University of Cambridge, where he was an Overseas Trust Scholar; his M.Sc. from the University of Oxford; and his B.A. from Columbia University.  He is the author of International Interplay: The Future of Expropriation Across International Dispute Settlement, whose Foreword was written by a world-famous international arbitration expert.  Dr. Dasgupta clerked for Judge David A. Faber of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia and for Judge Consuelo M. Callahan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  He served as Executive Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy's symposium issue and Executive Editor of the Berkeley Journal of International Law.

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Derek A. Webb is an associate at Sidley Austin, LLP, where he focuses on Supreme Court and Appellate litigation. He received his B.A. in philosophy from Yale University, Ph.D. in political theory from the University of Notre Dame, and J.D. from Georgetown Law School. Following law school, he was a Fellow in Stanford Law School's Constitutional Law Center, a Supreme Court Fellow in the Office of the Counselor to the Chief Justice, and a law clerk to Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. He has been published in Law and History Review, The American Journal of Legal History, The Journal of American Political Thought, The Journal of Legal Education, and Judicature. In 2012 he received the Warren E. Burger Prize from the American Inns of Court for his article "The Original Meaning of Civility: Democratic Deliberation at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention."

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Michael Pakaluk is Professor of Ethics and Social Philosophy in the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, where he is also a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Human Ecology. Before working at The Catholic University, Pakaluk held appointments as an Associate Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, and as a full Professor at the Institute for Psychological Sciences and at Ave Maria University. He has been Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, Santa Croce (Rome), and Holy Cross College, Visiting Scholar in Classics at Cambridge University, and Visiting Scholar in Public Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. In 2011, he was appointed an Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Pakaluk is a regular contributor to The Catholic Thing and the Boston Pilot and his opinion pieces have also appeared in numerous other publications, including First Things, and The National Review. He has authored many papers and books, three of which were concerned with Aristotelian ethics. His other books have included textbooks on accounting ethics, an autobiography of his conversion and life with his late wife, and an anthology of philosophical essays on friendship. His latest book, Mary's Voice in the Gospel According to John (Regnery Gateway), is forthcoming in February 2021. 

Pakaluk received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University, where his supervisor was John Rawls.

Josh Hammer is opinion editor of Newsweek, a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation, counsel and policy advisor for the Internet Accountability Project, a syndicated columnist through Creators and a contributing writer for American Compass. A frequent pundit and essayist on political, legal and cultural issues, Josh is a constitutional attorney by training.

An outspoken conservative, Josh opines on conservative intellectual trends, contemporary domestic and foreign policy debates, constitutional and legal issues, and the intersection of law, politics and culture. He has been published by many leading outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, National Affairs, The National Interest, National Review, First Things, The Spectator, The American Conservative, The American Mind, American Greatness, American Compass, Townhall, The Daily Wire, Fortune, Fox Business, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Jewish Journal. His first piece of formal legal scholarship was published in 2020 by the University of St. Thomas Law Journal.

Josh is a college campus speaker through Young America's Foundation and a law school campus speaker through the Federalist Society. Prior to Newsweek and the Daily Wire, where he was an editor, Josh worked at a large law firm and clerked for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Josh has also served as a John Marshall Fellow with the Claremont Institute.

Josh graduated from Duke University, where he majored in economics, and from the University of Chicago Law School. He lives in Denver, but remains an active member of the State Bar of Texas.

David F. Forte is Emeritus Professor of Law at Cleveland State University. He has the rare distinction of twice being award a Fulbright Distinguished Chair first at the University of Trento, and recently at the University of Warsaw.  In 2016 and 2017, Professor Forte was the Garwood Visiting Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics. He holds degrees from Harvard College, Manchester University, England, the University of Toronto and Columbia University.

During the Reagan administration, Professor Forte served as chief counsel to the United States delegation to the United Nations and alternate delegate to the Security Council.   He has assisted in drafting a number of pieces of legislation both for Congress and for the Ohio General Assembly dealing with abortion, international trade, and federalism.  He has sat as acting judge on the municipal court of Lakewood Ohio and was chairman of Professional Ethics Committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. He served as Consultor to the Pontifical Council for the Family under Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.   He has given over 300 invited addresses and papers at more than 100 academic institutions.  

Professor Forte was a Bradley Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, Visiting Scholar at the Liberty Fund, and Senior Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and the Constitution in at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.  He has been President of the Ohio Association of Scholars, was on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Society, and is also adjunct Scholar at the Ashbrook Institute.   He is Vice-Chair of the Ohio State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

He writes and speaks nationally on topics such as constitutional law, religious liberty, Islamic law, the rights of families, and international affairs.  He has published six books and over 200 law review articles and essays. His teaching competencies include Constitutional Law, the First Amendment, Islamic Law, Jurisprudence, American Politics, Natural Law, International Law, International Human Rights, and Constitutional History. 

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Justin Dyer is director of the Civitas Institute, professor of government, and Jack G. Taylor Regents Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author, with Kody Cooper, of The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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Andrew D. Graham is a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank whose mission is to promote religious freedom for everyone, everywhere. He is a regular presenter at universities, academic gatherings, and think tanks on law and religion.

Previously, Andrew was a partner at Jackson Walker LLP, a more than 130-year-old law firm with more than 400 lawyers across Texas. In private practice, he achieved an extensive record of success in high-stakes litigation in both trial and appellate courts and was named a “Super Lawyers—Rising Star” multiple times. He is an elected member of the Mont Pelerin Society and the Philadelphia Society, and a member of the Federalist Society and the Society for Classical Learning. He also serves on the Advisory Council for the American Public Philosophy Institute (APPI).

Andrew earned his bachelor’s degree at Southern Methodist University (SMU), where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and the Hyer Society. He then earned master’s degrees at Oxford University, where he was a member of Oriel College, and the University of Chicago before returning home to Texas to earn his law degree at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Andrew is a first-generation American (of Australian parents) and holds dual American–Australian citizenship. He and his wife Molly have three children.

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies,  Affiliate Professor of Political Science, and Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy at Baylor University, where he is also a Resident Scholar in Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion.  He is the author of over 100 academic articles, book chapters, and reviews, and over a dozen books including Politics for Christians: Statecraft As Soulcraft (InterVarsity, 2010), Never Doubt Thomas: The Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant (Baylor University Press, 2019), Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2015), winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2016 Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Constructive-Reflective Studies.  A graduate of Fordham University (Ph.D., philosophy) and the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis (Master of Juridical Studies), he has served as a 2002-2003 Visiting Research Fellow in Princeton University’s James Madison Program, the 2008-2009 Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow in the de Nicola Center at the University of Notre Dame, and the 2016-2017 Visiting Professor of Conservative Thought & Policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Gerard "Gerry" Bradley teaches Constitutional Law and Legal Ethics at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where he also directs (with John Finnis) the Natural Law Institute and co-edits The American Journal of Jurisprudence, an international forum of legal philosophy. He served as president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars for many years and has been a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute.

Bradley received both his B.A. and his J.D. from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude from the law school in 1980. Before teaching at Notre Dame, he served in the Trial Division of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and taught at the University of Chicago College of Law. In 2009, he was a Visiting Professor of Politics at Princeton University. 

Bradley has published over one hundred and fifty scholarly articles and reviews, and is the author and editor of twelve books, such as Catholic School Teaching: A Collection of Scholarly Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Unquiet Americans: U.S. Catholics, Moral Truth, and the Preservation of our Civil Liberties (Saint Augustine’s Press, 2019). 

Robert Miller is a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law and the F. Arnold Daum Fellow in Corporate Law, where his scholarship concerns corporate and securities law, the economic analysis of the law, and the philosophy of the law. Additionally, he serves as a Fellow and Program Affiliated Scholar at the Classical Liberal Institute at the New York University School of Law. Before joining the faculty of the University of Iowa, Miller taught law at Villanova University School of Law and the Associate Director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good at Villanova University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Cardozo Law School, and an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at the Columbia Law School. Before entering academia, Miller was an associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York. 

Miller earned his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy. He earned his M.A. and M.Phil in philosophy from Columbia University, where he held a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a Western Civilization Fellowship from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He earned his B.A. in philosophy and mathematics from Columbia College. 

Paul R. DeHart is associate professor of political science at Texas State University where he specializes in natural law, the American founding, early modern political theory, social contract theory, the grounds of political authority and obligation, and the relationship between religion and political order. He is author of Uncovering the Constitution’s Moral Design (University of Missouri Press 2007 and 2017) and editor, with Carson Holloway, of Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith (Northern Illinois University Press 2014). Speaking of Uncovering the Constitution's Moral Design, Hadley Arkes, Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions, emeritus at Amherst College says, “The remarkable achievement of this book is that the case DeHart makes for the moral telos of the Constitution has been made now in a way that must be utterly compelling to anyone who has not closed his mind entirely to the canons of reason. This is a rare and remarkable achievement. I know of nothing else that does the work this well.” Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, emeritus at Yale University, Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order is “a bold and courageous book, contesting the pieties of our present day. It fills a huge gap in the literature.” DeHart's articles have appeared in journals such as Polity, Critical Review, Locke Studies, Perspectives on Political Science, and the Catholic Social Science Review. He has also published several essays at online journals and webzines like Public Discourse and Law & Liberty. His public scholarship has been discussed within multiple Presidential campaigns and within state government. He has delivered invited lectures at Pembroke College of Oxford University in the Rothermere American Institute's Constitutional Thought and History Seminar, in a series for the Attorney General's Office for the State of Texas, and at the Law School of the University of Dayton.

DeHart holds a BA (summa cum laude) in political science and philosophy from Houghton College and an MA and PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.

Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University. He is a visiting scholar at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University.  He is also Associated Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and a Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion.  Mark earned a B.A. at Wheaton College (IL) and a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Virginia. 

Mark has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books on America's founding, including: The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742-1798 (University of Missouri Press, 1997); Collected Works of James Wilson (Liberty Fund Press, 2007); Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth (Nelson Books, 2019); Great Christian Jurists in American History (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2014); and Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013). 

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Josh Craddock is an associate at Latham & Watkins LLP. Previously, he clerked for Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, worked as a summer associate at Bancroft PLLC, and led the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy as editor-in-chief of its fortieth anniversary volume. Prior to law school, Mr. Craddock managed advocacy teams for several non-profit organizations at the United Nations and participated in negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals. He has been a contributor to National Review, First Things, Public Discourse, and Providence Magazine. Josh holds a B.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King's College and a J.D. from the Harvard Law School.

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