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Teach-In Speakers

Justin Dyer

Justin Dyer.

Justin Dyer is executive director of the Civitas Institute, professor of government, and Jack G. Taylor Regents Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He also is interim dean of the School of Civic Leadership. Dyer writes and teaches in the fields of American political thought, jurisprudence and constitutionalism, with an emphasis on the perennial philosophical tradition of natural law. He is the author or editor of eight books and numerous articles, essays and book reviews. His most recent book, with Kody Cooper, is The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. His previous books with Cambridge University Press include C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (2016); Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (2013); and Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition (2012). He also is co-editor of the two-volume constitutional law casebook American Constitutional Law (4th edition, West Academic), which has been adopted at leading universities across the country. Previously, he was professor of political science at the University of Missouri, where he served as the founding director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, a signature academic center for the study of American political thought and history. After attending the University of Oklahoma on a wrestling scholarship, he completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government at The University of Texas at Austin.


Mark Graber

Mark Graber.

Mark A. Graber is the Regents Professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. When not working to stay in shape if the New York Knicks decide they need a 67-year-old point guard, he writes on matters of constitutional law, constitutional development, constitutional politics, constitutional theory, and pretty much any other topic in which constitutional is used as an adjective. Professor Graber’s most recent book is Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War (University Press of Kansas, 2023).

Graber is also the author of A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford, 2013), Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, 2006) and co-editor (with Keith Whittington and Howard Gillman) of American Constitutionalism: Structures and Powers and American Constitutionalism: Rights and Powers, both also from Oxford University Press, and co-editor with Mark Tushnet and Sandy Levinson of Constitutional Democracy in Crisis (Oxford, 2018).

Graber is also the author of over 100 articles, including “The Non-Majoritarian Problem: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary” in Studies in American Political Development, “Naked Land Transfers and American Constitutional Development,” published in the Vanderbilt Law Review, and “Resolving Political Questions into Judicial Questions: Tocqueville’s Aphorism Revisited,” published by Constitutional Commentary.

He has been a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, Yale Law School, the University of Virginia School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, the University of Oregon School of Law, and Simon Reichman University.


Victoria Nourse

Victoria Nourse is Ralph V. Whitworth Professor in Law at Georgetown University and is one of the nation’s leading scholars on statutory interpretation, Congress, and the separation of powers. Professor Nourse is director of Georgetown’s first Center on Congressional Studies.

Her most recent book is The Impeachments of Donald Trump: An Introduction to Constitutional Argument” (West Academic, 2021). She is the author of Misreading Law, Misreading Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2016). She has also published widely on the power of the president and the separation of powers and on constitutional rights, including her book, In Reckless Hands (Norton, 2008), the story of Skinner v. Oklahoma and American eugenics.

Nourse has had a distinguished career in government up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2015-2016, she served as the appellate lawyer in the Justice Department and Special Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The story of her role in the fight for the original Violence Against Women Act is told in Fred Strebeigh’s 2009 book Equal: Women Reshape American Law.

Prior to teaching at Georgetown, Nourse held chairs at the Emory University and the University of Wisconsin. She has also been a visiting professor at Yale, NYU, Northwestern, and the University of Maryland. She began her legal career in New York, clerking for a legendary trial judge, Edward Weinfeld, and practicing at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. She left private practice to serve as junior counsel to the Senate-Iran Contra Committee under Senators Rudman and Inouye


Reva Siegel

Reva Siegel.

Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Siegel’s writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution.

Her books include Processes of Constitutional Decision-Making (8th ed. 2022) (with Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar & Cristina Rodriguez); Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories (2019) (co-edited with Melissa Murray & Kate Shaw), and Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (2d ed. 2012) (with Linda Greenhouse).

Her articles include “The History of History and Tradition: The Roots of Dobbs’ Method (and Originalism) in the Defense of Segregation,” 133 Yale L.J.F. (2024); “Guided by History: Protecting the Public Sphere from Weapons Threats under Bruen,” 98 N.Y.U. Rev. (forthcoming 2023) (with Joseph Blocher); “Memory Games: Dobbs’s Originalism as Anti-Democratic Living Constitutionalism — and Some Pathways for Resistance,” 101 Tex. L. Rev. 1127 (2023); “Equal Protection in Dobbs and Beyond: How States Protect Life Inside and Outside of the Abortion Context,” 43 Colum. J. of Gender & the Law 67 (2023) (with Serena Mayeri & Melissa Murray); “The Politics of Constitutional Memory,” 20 Geo. J. L & Pub. Pol’y 19 (2022); “Answering the Lochner Objection: Substantive Due Process and the Role of Courts in a Democracy,” 96 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1902 (2021) (with Douglas NeJaime); The Constitutionalization of Disparate Impact — Court-Centered and Popular Pathways, 106 Cal. L. Rev. 2001 (2019); and “Community in Conflict: Same-Sex Marriage and Backlash,” 64 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 1728 (2017).

Siegel is a member of the American Philosophical Society and  of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. She serves on the board of Advisors and the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society and on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law.


George Thomas

George Thomas.

George Thomas is Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions and director of the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. His research and teaching focus broadly on American constitutionalism.

He is the author of The (Un)Written Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Founders and the Idea of a National University: Constituting the American Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and The Madisonian Constitution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, his work also has appeared in The Atlantic, The Bulwark, and the Washington Post.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library and is the recipient of the Alexander George Award from the American Political Science Association.


Stephen Vladeck

Stephen I. Vladeck.

Stephen I. Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. 

Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. He has argued over a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and various lower federal civilian and military courts; has testified before numerous congressional committees, Executive Branch agencies, and the Texas legislature; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. state and federal courts and in foreign tribunals; and has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession.

Vladeck is the co-host, together with Professor Bobby Chesney, of the popular and award-winning National Security Law Podcast. He is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading National Security Law and Counterterrorism Law casebooks. And he is editor and author of  One First, a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court.

Vladeck joined the Texas faculty in 2016 after 11 years teaching at the University of Miami School of Law and American University Washington College of Law. He is a twice-elected member of the University of Texas Faculty Council (and of the Faculty Council's Executive Committee); an elected member of the American Law Institute; a Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law; and a senior editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy. He is the Supreme Court Fellow at the Project on Government Oversight’s Constitution Project; a Distinguished Fellow of the National Institute of Military Justice; and a member of the Advisory Committee to the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security, the American Constitution Society’s Board of Academic Advisors, and the advisory boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the RAND History of U.S. Military Policy.

A 2004 graduate of Yale Law School, Vladeck clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

While a law student, he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and the student director of the Balancing Civil Liberties & National Security Post-9/11 Litigation Project, and he was awarded the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize for Outstanding Moot Court Oralist and shared the Potter Stewart Prize for Best Team Performance in Moot Court.

He earned a bachelor of arts degree summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig's Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present,” and shared the Alfred J. Havighurst Prize as the outstanding senior history major. A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in central Austin with his wife, Karen (a managing director at Whistler Partners), their daughters, Madeleine and Sydney, and their 9-year-old pug, Roxanna.