Rebecca Haw Allensworth, the David Daniels Allen Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, studies antitrust and professional licensing. Her work on antitrust focuses on how to adapt competition policy to address competition problems posed by tech platforms, and her research on professional licensing explores how lawmakers should balance the need for expertise in regulating the professions with the problems that can arise from self-regulation. Her book, The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work and Why It Goes Wrong, was published by Harvard University Press in 2025.
Rebecca Aviel is a professor and Maxine Kurtz Faculty Research Scholar at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Her research and teaching interests include legal ethics and professional responsibility, family law, and constitutional law, with a scholarly focus on the opportunities for insight where these fields intersect. Her current research examines the role of lawyers in a constitutional democracy, the constitutional implications of professional regulation, and innovation in the delivery of legal services to litigants in family court.
Matthew Burnett is Senior Program Officer for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation (ABF), a visiting scholar with the Justice Futures Project at Arizona State University, and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Burnett’s writing on access to justice and legal empowerment has appeared in more than twenty publications, and he has given more than eighty presentations and workshops around the world. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, the World Bank, and the International Development Research Centre. He serves as an advisor to the National Center for Access to Justice and is co-founder of Frontline Justice.
Natalie Byrom is a UK-based researcher and policy adviser with expertise in justice system reform, data-driven technologies, and data governance. She has a track record of leading high-quality research and translating this into meaningful policy impact. Between 2018 and 2020, Dr. Byrom was seconded to the UK Ministry of Justice as expert adviser on data in the context of an ongoing £1 billion program of digital court reform. She is part of the BBC Expert Women Network and currently holds a number of public appointments, membership of the Ministry of Justice’s Senior Data Governance Panel, and the Civil Justice Council, where she was appointed in 2022 as member for information architecture and econometrics.
Samantha DiDomenico is a senior manager at Stout Risius Ross, LLC, and has nearly ten years of experience providing consulting services to for-profit and nonprofit clients in a variety of industries. She has expertise in understanding large, complex systems and data sets and their intersection with business and social issues. Her work often includes conducting economic impact assessments and program evaluations, conducting independent research, interpreting and analyzing voluminous data sets, and developing transformative change strategies for her clients.
David Freeman Engstrom is the LSVF Professor in Law and Co-Director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford University. An award-winning scholar, longtime litigator, and nationally recognized expert on procedure and law and technology, Engstrom is a member of the American Law Institute, where he serves as the Reporter for Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication, a member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Allison K. Hoffman is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. She is an expert on health care law and policy, and examines some of the most important legal and social issues of our time, including health insurance regulation, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and retiree health care expenses, and long-term care. Her research aims to bring greater descriptive and analytical clarity to the purposes of health care and health insurance regulation and policy design. She co-edited the Oxford Handbook of U.S. Health Law (2017), with I. Glenn Cohen and William M. Sage, which offers the most comprehensive review of US health law in the post-Affordable Care Act (ACA) era.
Samuel Issacharoff is the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law. He is a leading figure in the study of democracy, constitutions, and the courts, and is the author of Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts (2015) and, more recently, Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty (2023). He served as a senior legal advisor to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and has long experience as an appellate advocate in American courts.
Hon. Carolyn B. Kuhl presides in a Complex Civil Litigation Department of the Los Angeles Superior Court (LASC). She previously served as the Presiding Judge of the LASC in 2015 and 2016, Assistant Presiding Judge in 2013 and 2014, and Supervising Judge of the Civil Departments from 2011 to 2012 and from 2003 to 2004. A leader in the reform of civil litigation and case management, Judge Kuhl is the co-author of “Toward Fairer, Quicker, Cheaper Litigation: A Unified Theory of Civil Case Management,” published in Judicature in 2023. Judge Kuhl is a member of the American Law Institute’s Council.
Genevieve Lakier is a professor of law and a Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. She teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on social media platforms.
Brian Libgober is an assistant professor of political science and law at Northwestern University. His research focuses on the political economy of American institutions, with a special emphasis on the making of regulations by executive agencies. Thematically, he is interested in the relationship between economic inequality, interest group power, and the design of legal institutions. Methodologically, his work combines a variety of approaches, including formal models, quantitative empirics, and case studies.
Jess X. Lu graduated from Stanford Law School in June of 2024. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and, prior to law school, worked as a senior associate consultant in Bain & Company’s Boston office. In the fall of 2024, Lu began working as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC. She will then clerk for Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2025.
Beverly B. Martin is the Director of NYU School of Law’s Center on Civil Justice. From 2010 through 2021, she served as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Prior to joining the Court of Appeals, Judge Martin sat for nearly a decade as a US District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia. She also serves on the boards of the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Campaign Legal Center.
Jamila Michener is an associate professor in Cornell University’s Department of Government and School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on poverty, racial inequality, and public policy in the United States. Her recent book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics (2018), examines how Medicaid – the nation’s public health insurance program for people with low income – affects democratic citizenship, and assesses American political life from the vantage points of those who are living in or near poverty, are (disproportionately) Black or Latino, and are reliant on a federated government for vital resources. Her next book (with Mallory SoRelle), Uncivil Democracy: Power, Politics, and Access to Justice, explores how civil legal institutions influence the political lives of racially and economically marginalized people.
Philip G. Peters is the Ruth L. Hulston Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Missouri School of Law. He is an expert in medical malpractice law and medical malpractice reform. In that capacity, he currently serves as an advisor to the drafters of medical malpractice provisions of the Restatement Third of Torts. His other area of scholarly interest is the identification of educational reforms with the greatest potential to reduce racial achievement disparities.
Daniel B. Rodriguez is the Harold Washington Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where he served as Dean from 2012 to 2018. His principal academic work is in the areas of administrative law, local government law, statutory interpretation, federal and state constitutional law, and the law-business-technology interface. He is a member of the American Law Institute’s Council.
Giesela Rühl is a professor at Humboldt University Berlin (Germany) and a director of the Humboldt Center for the Legal Profession. Her current research focuses on the opportunities and risks that digitalization poses for the enforcement of (consumer) rights. She investigates how (state) court proceedings can benefit from digitalization processes – and what the (German) judiciary can learn from other countries and from legal tech companies. Rühl is an (elected) member of the European Law Institute, the International Academy of Comparative Law, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. She is also the Secretary General of the European Association of Private International Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the German Legal Tech Association.
Rebecca L. Sandefur is a professor in, and director of, the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University (ASU). She investigates access to civil justice from every angle – from how legal services are delivered and consumed, to how civil legal aid is organized around the nation, to the role of pro bono, to the relative efficacy of lawyers, nonlawyers, and digital tools as advisers and representatives, to how ordinary people think about their justice problems and try to resolve them. In addition to her appointment at ASU, Sandefur is Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative.
Lauren van Schilfgaarde is an assistant professor at UCLA School of Law. Her research focuses on Tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law. She previously was the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Tribal Legal Development Clinic Director at UCLA Law wherein she supervised live-client projects concerning tribal governance and justice systems, ethics, cultural resource protection, voting, child welfare, and more. She currently serves as co-chair for the Native American Concerns Committee of the American Bar Association and as a board member of the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation, Pukúu Cultural Community Services, and the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Section on Indian Nations & Indigenous Peoples.
Neil Steinkamp is a managing director at Stout Risius Ross, LLC, and is a well-recognized expert and consultant on a broad range of strategic, organizational, compliance, and financial issues to government, business, courts, and community leaders and their advisors. He has over twenty years of experience covering many industries and matter types and has particular expertise in transformative change strategies, complex structured and unstructured data analysis and assessment, multi-stakeholder collaboration and coordination, the development of pathways to compliance and iterative change strategies, financial and fiscal impact analyses, and other complex topics. He also leads Stout’s pro bono practice.
W. Bradley Wendel is the Edwin H. Woodruff Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. His teaching interests are in the regulation of the legal profession and torts, and his research focuses on the application of moral and political philosophy to problems of legal ethics. He previously served as a co-reporter for the American Bar Association’s Ethics 20/20 Commission and as co-chair of the New York State Judicial Task Force on Attorney Discipline. He has been a member of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam drafting committee since 2007.