Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H. L. A. Hart.
Originalism is a legal theory that bases constitutional, judicial, and statutory interpretation of text on the original understanding at the time of its adoption. Proponents of the theory object to judicial activism and other interpretations related to a living constitution framework. Instead, originalists argue for democratic modifications of laws through the legislature or through constitutional amendment.
John Hart Ely was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of law at Yale Law School from 1968 to 1973, Harvard Law School from 1973 to 1982, Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1996, and at the University of Miami Law School from 1996 until his death. From 1982 until 1987, he was the 9th dean of Stanford Law School.
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated to the high court by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served on it since January 31, 2006. After Antonin Scalia, Alito is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jeremy Waldron is a New Zealander legal philosopher. He holds a University Professorship at the New York University School of Law, is affiliated with the New York University Department of Philosophy, and was formerly the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford University. Waldron also holds an adjunct professorship at Victoria University of Wellington. Waldron is regarded as one of the world's leading legal and political philosophers.
John Frank Corvino is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and the dean of the Honors College at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and the author of several books, with a focus on the morality of homosexuality. Corvino is sometimes referred to as "The Gay Moralist", a sobriquet he assumed while writing a column of the same name.
Kevin J. "Seamus" Hasson is Founder and President Emeritus of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, public interest law firm that represents persons of all faiths. The Becket Fund is well known for successfully representing the Little Sisters of the Poor in the U.S. Supreme Court. The firm also successfully represented Hobby Lobby in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell, in which the Supreme Court held that protections under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act applied to closely held corporations. The Becket Fund also secured a victory in EEOC v. Hosanna Tabor, which the Wall Street Journal called one of "the most important religious liberty cases in half a century."
Andrew Koppelman is the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and professor of political science at Northwestern University. He is the recipient of the 2015 Walder Award for Research Excellence. The main focus of his research is on the intersection of law and political philosophy.
Brian Leiter is an American philosopher and legal scholar who is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and founder and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. A review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews described Leiter as "one of the most influential legal philosophers of our time", while a review in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies described Leiter's book Nietzsche on Morality (2002) as "arguably the most important book on Nietzsche's philosophy in the past twenty years."
Richard W. Garnett is the Paul J. Schierl / Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law, a Concurrent Professor of Political Science, and the founding Director of the Notre Dame Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School. He teaches in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, First Amendment law, and the death penalty. He has contributed to research in such topics as school choice and Catholic social teaching. His articles have appeared in a variety of prominent law journals, including the Cornell Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. He also regularly appears in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal and as a guest on National Public Radio.
Iain Tyrrell Benson is a legal philosopher and practising legal consultant. The main focus of his work in relation to law and society has been to examine some of the various meanings that underlie terms of common but confused usage. His work towards an understanding of secular and secularism has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada and the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He has also given critical study to the terms pluralism, faith, believer, unbeliever, liberalism and accommodation and examined the implications for various legal and non-legal usages.
Mark David Hall is a professor in Regent University's Robertson School of Government and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, an initiative of the First Liberty Institute. Mark is also Distinguished Scholar of Christianity & Public Life at George Fox University, a Senior Fellow 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. In 2022-2023, he was a Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program and a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center.
What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense is a 2012 book about marriage by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and the philosopher Robert P. George, in which the authors argue against same-sex marriage.
Vincent Phillip Muñoz is an American political scientist. He is the Tocqueville Professor in the Department of Political Science and Concurrent Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of two books on the principles of the American Founding focusing on religious liberty and the separation of church and state in the United States.
Amy Vivian Coney Barrett is an American lawyer and jurist serving since 2020 as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The fifth woman to serve on the court, she was nominated by President Donald Trump. Barrett was a U.S. circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020.
Ryan Thomas Anderson is an American religious conservative who is primarily known for his opposition to LGBT rights in the United States, including the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States, laws that ban discrimination against LGBT people, and laws that ban the practice of conversion therapy on children.
Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. 522 (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with litigation over discrimination of local regulations based on the Free Exercise Clause and Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The specific case deals with a religious-backed foster care agency that was denied a new contract by the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, due to the agency's refusal to certify married same-sex couples as foster parents on religious grounds.
Justice and Jurisprudence is a book that was first published in 1889 by the Brotherhood of Liberty. It was a critique of rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States on the Reconstruction Amendments. The book is "the first known comprehensive book on jurisprudence written by blacks" and serves as a valuable source of information on African Americans' legal opinions in the late 19th century.
Ordered liberty is a concept in political philosophy, where individual freedom is balanced with the necessity for maintaining social order. In "Ordered Liberty," Randy E. Barnett examines the concept of ordered liberty and its relationship to the U.S. Constitution. He argues that the Constitution was designed to protect individual liberty within a framework of ordered liberty, which balances the need for social order with the importance of individual freedom.
Sherif Girgis is an associate professor of law at the University of Notre Dame with expertise in criminal law, constitutional law, constitutional theory, the intersection of law and religion, and philosophy of law. Girgis teaches courses in criminal law, jurisprudence, and constitutional law. He has served as a professor at Notre Dame since 2021.
