Annual Conference

Noel J Francisco

Noel John Francisco served as the 47th Solicitor General of the United States from September 2017 until June 2020. He is currently a partner with Jones Day. During his time as Solicitor General Noel he argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court, including Trump v. Hawaii, where he successfully defended the president's orders restricting travel from countries deemed to present security risks; Janus v. AFSCME, which upheld the First Amendment rights of public employees who decline to join labor unions; Knick v. Township of Scott, which held that property owners could sue state and local governments in federal court to vindicate Fifth Amendment takings claims; NLRB v. Noel Canning, which limited the president's constitutional recess appointments power; and Zubik v. Burwell, which challenged federal insurance coverage regulations that violated Catholic organizations' religious beliefs.

In his private practice, Francisco represents clients in a broad array of civil and criminal litigation, challenges to federal and state laws and regulations, and government investigations and enforcement actions. The matters he handles often have significant public policy implications, including in the areas of global climate change, opioids, asbestos, tobacco, firearms, health care, administrative law, free speech, religious liberty, and separation of powers.

Mr. Francisco received his B.A. with honors in 1991 from the University of Chicago, and a J.D. with high honors in 1996 from the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, Mr. Francisco served as a law clerk to Judge J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit before clerking for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court.

Donald B. Verrilli

Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. served as the 46th Solicitor General of the United States from June 2011 to June 2016. He is currently a partner with Munger, Tolles & Olson. During his time as Solicitor General, he argued more than 50 cases before the Supreme Court, including landmark decisions upholding the Affordable Care Act (National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell) and recognizing marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges). Mr. Verrilli also achieved victories in two important patent cases, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank and Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, in a case vindicating the president’s foreign affairs authority in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, and in numerous cases involving civil rights, women’s rights and other matters of national importance involving antitrust, copyright, telecommunications, the environment, the First Amendment, the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, the separation of powers, criminal law and other federal constitutional and statutory matters.

In addition to handling matters before the U.S. Supreme Court and the courts of appeals, Mr. Verrilli’s practice focuses on representing and counseling clients on multi-dimensional problems, where litigation, regulation and public policy intersect to shape markets and industries in our evolving economy. 

Verrilli received his undergraduate degree from Yale University and his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review and was a James Kent Scholar. He served as a law clerk to the Honorable J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to the Honorable William J. Brennan, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court.

Elizabeth Sepper

Professor of Law, University of Texas School of Law. Elizabeth Sepper is a nationally recognized scholar of religious liberty, health law, and equality. She has written extensively on conscientious refusals to provide reproductive and end-of-life healthcare, on conflicts over religion and insurance coverage, and on conflicts related to religion and anti-discrimination. Professor Sepper’s articles appear in various journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Gender & Law. Her article, Doctoring Discrimination in the Same-Sex Marriage Debates, on the issue of religious objections to gay rights won multiple awards, including the 2014 Dukeminier Award for best sexuality law scholarship. She is the editor of Law, Religion, and Health in the United States (Holly Fernandez Lynch, I. Glenn Cohen, & Elizabeth Sepper, eds. Cambridge Univ. 2017). 

Frederick Gedicks

Guy Anderson Chair and Professor of Law, Brigham Young University J. Reuben Clark Law School. Frederick Mark Gedicks has been at BYU Law School since 1990 and has held the Guy Anderson Chair since 2005. He teaches constitutional law and legal theory and is widely published in the areas of law and religion and constitutional interpretation. Recent and forthcoming publications include “The Myth of Second Class Free Exercise,” “Coase and Accommodation: A Reply,”  “Custom, Preference, or Nature? Mormon Polygamy, Same-Sex Marriage, and Natural Law Theory,” and “Christian Dignity and the Overlapping Consensus.” He earned degrees in economics and philosophy from Brigham Young University and a law degree from the University of Southern California, where he also served as an editor of the law review. Following a 9th Circuit clerkship, Professor Gedicks practiced corporation and securities law in Phoenix, Arizona until he entered law teaching at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

Jessie Hill

Judge Ben C. Green Professor of Law, School of Law, Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, Case Western Reserve School of Law. Jessie Hill’s teaching and scholarship focus on constitutional law, civil rights, reproductive rights, and law and religion. Her articles have been published in the Michigan Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, and Texas Law Review, among others. She has also appeared in numerous local and national press outlets, including CNN, the New York Times, Ms. Magazine, and NPR. Professor Hill is a frequent lecturer and consultant on reproductive rights issues, and she is currently litigating numerous challenges to abortion restrictions in Ohio. She is the founding director of the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative at the School of Law, which provides education and legal support relating to reproductive rights. Her work was recently profiled in the Case Law-Med magazine. She served as law clerk to the Honorable Karen Nelson Moore of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She received her JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard University and her AB, magna cum laude, from Brown University.

Sherif Girgis

Associate Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School. Sherif Girgis joined Notre Dame Law School in 2021. His work at the intersection of philosophy and law—including criminal law, constitutional theory, and jurisprudence—has appeared in academic and popular venues including the New York University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Prior to joining Notre Dame, he practiced appellate and complex civil litigation at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., having previously served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Now completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton, Girgis earned his J.D. at Yale Law School. He earned a master’s degree (B.Phil.) in philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.

Moderator: Micah Schwartzman

Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law. Micah Schwartzman is a scholar whose research focuses on law and religion, jurisprudence, political philosophy and constitutional law. His scholarship has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Supreme Court Review, Law & Philosophy, and Political Theory, among others; he co-edited The Rise of Corporate Religious Liberty (Oxford University Press); and he has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, and Vox. He is also the director of the Karsh Center for Law. Schwartzman received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. After law school, he clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Stephanie Barclay

Professor of Law, Faculty Director, Religious Liberty Initiative, Notre Dame Law School. Stephanie Barclay’s research focuses on the role our different democratic institutions play in protecting minority rights, particularly at the intersection of free speech and religious exercise. Barclay has published work in the Harvard Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others. Her recent article, “An Economic Approach to Religious Exemptions,” was selected for the 2020 Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Barclay has frequently appeared in the national media to discuss First Amendment issues, including appearances on BBC World News, NBC News, and Wall Street Journal Live. And her work has been featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg BNA, Deseret News, The Hill, and Law 360. Barclay has also served as a law clerk to Judge N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Christopher Lund

Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School. Christopher C. Lund is a leading church-state scholar. His academic work has been published in numerous law journals, such as the Michigan Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Journal of Law and Religion. Along with Michael McConnell and Thomas Berg, he is the author of a leading church-state casebook, Religion and the Constitution, the fifth edition of which was published by Aspen in 2022.  In addition to teaching courses related to religious liberty, Lund teaches a variety of other courses, including Torts, Contracts, Constitutional Law, and Evidence. Excited to teach students, he has been voted Professor of the Year eight times. Before teaching, he clerked for the Hon. Karen Nelson Moore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and served as the Madison Fellow at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Lund earned his law degree with high honors from the University of Texas School of Law and his bachelor’s from Rice University, summa cum laude.

Zalman Rothschild

Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Zalman Rothschild's research focuses on the First Amendment, anti-discrimination law, and law and religion. His scholarship has appeared in Cornell Law Review, the Journal of Law and Religion, Columbia Law Review Forum, Yale Law Journal Forum, and other academic publications, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. His writing for popular audiences has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, the Jewish Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2023, Rothschild received the AALS Law and Religion Section’s Harold Berman Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Before becoming a Bigelow Fellow, Zalman served as a law clerk to Judge Jane Roth on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and practiced law for several years as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss. Zalman holds a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, a PhD in Religion from New York University, an MA from Yeshiva University, and a BA from Binghamton University.

Nelson Tebbe

Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law. Nelson Tebbe works on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and general constitutional law. He is the author of Religious Freedom In An Egalitarian Age (Harvard University Press, 2017). His articles have appeared in Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Journal of Religion, Michigan Law Review, Supreme Court Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and many others. As a media commentator, he has published opinion pieces in outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scotusblog, Slate, and the Washington Post. Before teaching, Tebbe clerked for Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and practiced law at the American Civil Liberties Union and at Davis Polk & Wardwell. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Professor Tebbe also holds a Ph.D. with distinction in the anthropology and sociology of religion from the University of Chicago.

Moderator: Rev. Patrick Reidy

Associate Professor Law, Notre Dame School of Law. Rev. Patrick E. Reidy, C.S.C. teaches and writes in the areas of property law, land use, and religion. He also serves as the faculty director for the Church Properties Initiative within the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, and an ordained Roman Catholic priest with the Congregation of Holy Cross. His work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, and Florida Law Review. Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, Father Pat taught property as a Visiting Lecturer in Law and Fellow in Private Law at Yale Law School. He clerked for the Honorable Thomas M. Hardiman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Alan Brownstein

Professor of Law Emeritus, UC Davis School of Law. Alan Brownstein is a nationally recognized Constitutional Law scholar. While the primary focus of his scholarship relates to church-state issues and free exercise and establishment clause doctrine, he has also written extensively on freedom of speech, privacy and autonomy rights, and other constitutional law subjects. His articles have been published in numerous academic journals including the Stanford Law Review, Cornell Law Review, UCLA Law Review and Constitutional Commentary. Brownstein received the UC Davis School of Law's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995 and the UC Davis Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award in 2008. He is a member of the American Law Institute. A graduate of Antioch College and Harvard Law School (where he served as a Case Editor of the Harvard Law Review), Brownstein was an attorney in general litigation and corporate practice with the law firm of Tuttle & Taylor in Los Angeles before joining the UC Davis law faculty. From 1977-78, he clerked for the Honorable Frank M. Coffin, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in Portland, Maine.

Netta Barak-Corren

Professor of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, UCHV Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, Princeton University. Netta Barak-Corren is a legal scholar and cognitive scientist, focusing on empirical and behavioral analysis of constitutional and public law, with a particular interest in conflicts of rights and the interaction between law and religion and law and social norms. In 2022-2023, she served as a Visiting Professor at Chicago Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law and a Visiting Fellow at Edmund & Lily Safra Center for Ethics in Harvard. Barak-Corren has won numerous awards and competitive research grants for her work, including a Starting Grant from the European Research Council, an individual research grant from the Israeli Science Foundation, the S.Z. Cheshin Young Scholar Award for Academic Excellence in Law, and the Gorni Prize for an Outstanding Young Scholar in Public Law. Barak-Corren received her LL.B. in Law and B.A. in Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University.  She clerked for the Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, Hon. Dorit Beinish, and completed her doctoral studies at Harvard.

Nicholas P. Miller

Professor of Church History; Director, International Religious Liberty Institute, Andrews University. Nicholas P. Miller is both a scholar and practitioner of matters at the interaction of church and state. He holds degrees in law (Columbia University), church history (University of Notre Dame), and theology (Pacific Union College), including a PhD in the history of religious freedom in America. In addition to his academic work, he has practiced law for more than twenty-five years in state and federal court, specializing in the needs of churches, religious colleges and universities, and other religious institutions. He has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in the church/state case of Mitchell v. Helms, written many federal appellate briefs on church/state matters, and authored numerous scholarly and professional articles on matters of the law and history of church/state matters, and written a book dealing with religious influences on the American Constitution entitled The Religious Roots of the First Amendment (OUP 2012).

Jim Oleske

Professor of Law, Lewis and Clark Law School. Jim Oleske’s research focuses on the intersection of religious liberty and other constitutional values, and he was a Fulbright Scholar based at Cardiff University’s Centre for Law and Religion in 2019. His 2015 article, The Evolution of Accommodation: Comparing the Unequal Treatment of Religious Objections to Interracial and Same-Sex Marriages, was selected by UCLA’s Williams Institute for a Dukeminier Award. He was also the recipient of the inaugural Huffman Scholarship Award at Lewis & Clark for his 2019 article, Free Exercise (Dis)Honesty, as well as the Leo Levenson Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014. He joined Lewis & Clark Law School in 2011, after serving as Chief of Staff of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs during the first two years of the Obama Administration. Earlier in his career, he served as an appellate attorney at the National Labor Relations Board; chief of staff of the Oregon Senate Majority Office; counsel in the Office of U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle; and law clerk to then-Third Circuit Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

Moderator: Richard Garnett

Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corp. Professor of Law, Notre Dame School of Law. Richard W. Garnett teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, the First Amendment, and law and religion. He is a leading authority on questions and debates regarding religious freedom and church-state relations, and is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society. Garnett clerked for the late Chief Justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist, and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Duke University in 1990. He joined the faculty in 1999 after practicing law in Washington, D.C. with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.

Nathan Chapman

Pope F. Brock Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law. Nathan S. Chapman teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, religious liberty and ethics. Chapman is also a McDonald Distinguished Fellow of Law and Religion at the Emory Center for Law and Religion. He is the author, with Michael W. McConnell, of a forthcoming volume from the Oxford University Press titled Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Promotes Religious Pluralism and Protects Freedom of Conscience. His scholarship focuses on the historical and theoretical underpinnings of constitutional law, especially the law of religious liberty and due process. He has also written several essays on Christianity and the law. Chapman holds degrees in law and theology from Duke University. He litigated in the Washington, D.C., office of WilmerHale and clerked for Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit before joining the UGA faculty in 2013.

Audra Savage

Assistant Professor of Law, Wake Forest University School of Law. Audra Lyn Savage interrogates race and racism in law, specifically focusing on critical race corporate law, as well as law, race & religion. She teaches courses on business organizations, mergers & acquisitions, and critical race theory. Professor Savage's scholarship has been published in the Columbia Law Review Forum, Utah Law Review, and the Journal of Law and Religion. She also has a chapter in a peer-reviewed collection of essays on Derrick Bell's racial realism. Professor Savage is the recipient of the 2020 Innovation, Business and Law Center Prize from the University of Iowa College of Law, and the Gertie & John Witte Prize in Law & Religion (2018). Prior to joining the Wake Forest Law faculty, Professor Savage was a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Hon. James A. Wynn, Jr.) and was the Senior Lecturer and McDonald Distinguished Fellow at Emory University School of Law. Professor Savage earned her SJD and LLM at Emory Law and her JD at Columbia Law School. 

Anna Su

Associate Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Anna Su's primary areas of research include the law and history of international human rights law, comparative constitutional law, technology and international law, and law and religion. She also currently serves as Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Anna holds an SJD from Harvard Law School where her dissertation was awarded the John Laylin Prize for best paper in international law. She received her JD and AB degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Prior to coming to Toronto, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy based in SUNY Buffalo Law School, and a graduate fellowship in ethics with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She worked as a law clerk for the Philippine Supreme Court and was a consultant to the Philippine government negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Victor Muniz-Fraticelli

Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at McGill University. Victor Muniz-Fraticelli’s interests range across philosophy, politics, and law. He is the author of The Structure of Pluralism (Oxford 2014) and several articles on legal and political pluralism, church-state relations, intergenerational justice, constitutionalism, and theories of justice. His current work concerns political theology and the institutional dimensions of freedom of religious freedom, especially religious schooling. In 2019, he received a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago (2008) and his JD from the University of Puerto Rico (1999) and clerked at the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico.

Moderator: Asma Uddin

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Columbus School of Law, Catholic University. Asma Uddin is the author of When Islam Is Not a Religion: Inside America's Fight for Religious Freedom (2019) and The Politics of Vulnerability: How to Heal Muslim-Christian Relations in a Post-Christian America (2021). Professor Uddin is also a Fellow with the Aspen Institute's Religion & Society program, where she is leading a project on Muslim-Christian polarization in the U.S. She was formerly legal counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and has held academic fellowships at Harvard, Georgetown, and UCLA. Professor Uddin served two terms as an expert advisor on religious freedom to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and was a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a member of The University of Chicago Law Review.