Adam Winkler is a professor at UCLA School of Law, where he also serves as the school’s ACS faculty advisor and as a member of ACS’s Board of Academic Advisors. Winkler sits on the ACS Board of Advisors.
Winkler has published widely on American constitutional law and history, and his scholarship has been cited in landmark Supreme Court cases, including opinions on the Second Amendment and on corporate free speech rights. Winkler is the author of “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights” and “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” He was the co-editor of the “Encyclopedia of the American Constitution” (2d edition). Winkler’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Atlantic, New Republic, Slate, and Scotusblog.
Winkler received his J.D. from New York University School of Law, which honored him with the Legal Teaching Award for outstanding alumni in legal academia. He is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and holds a M.A. in political science from UCLA. He clerked for the late Hon. David Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Donald B. Verrilli Jr. served as Solicitor General of the United States from 2011 to 2016. His landmark victories included his successful advocacy in defense of the Affordable Care Act, for marriage equality, and in favor of federal preemption authority in the immigration field. In 2017, Verrilli was appointed to the ACS board of directors.
Before serving as Solicitor General, Verrilli served as Deputy White House Counsel, and previously, as an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. In those positions, he counseled the president and senior government officials on a wide range of legal issues involving national security, economic regulation, domestic policy, and the scope of executive and administrative authority.
Verrilli joined Munger, Tolles & Olson in October 2016, and is the founder of its Washington, D.C. office. His practice focuses on Supreme Court and appellate litigation and 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.
He earned his J.D. with honors in 1983 from Columbia Law School, and was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review, and earned his B.A. in 1979 from Yale University. He clerked for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. for the U.S. Supreme Court from 1984-1985 and Judge J. Skelly Wright for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1983-1984.
Christine A. Varney is a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where she chairs the firm’s antitrust practice. She is also a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School and speaks publicly on the topics of antitrust, international competition, mergers and government investigations. Varney served on the ACS board of directors from 2012-2018.
Varney is the only person to have served as both the U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust and as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. She also served as Assistant to the President and Secretary to the Cabinet in the Clinton Administration. Earlier in her career, Varney was an attorney at Hogan and Hartson.
The National Law Journal has selected Varney as one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America,” and one of 50 Governance, Risk & Compliance Trailblazers & Pioneers. She was named a “Competition MVP” by Law360 and “Lawyer of the Year” by Global Competition Review. She is a member of the International Bar Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and The Economic Club of New York.
Varney received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany, an M.P.A. from Syracuse University, and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.
David A. Strauss is the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and faculty director of the Jenner & Block Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic. His teaching interests include constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, administrative law, civil procedure and torts. In 2012, Strauss was appointed to the ACS board of directors.
Strauss has served as an assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, special counsel to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate, and an attorney-adviser in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. He has argued 19 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and has testified numerous times before Congress. He is co-editor of the “Supreme Court Review,” along with Geoffrey Stone, Justin Driver, and Dennis Hutchinson.
Strauss is the author of “The Living Constitution” (Oxford University Press, 2010) and many academic and popular articles. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Georgetown, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served as chair of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and as a member of the board of governors of the Chicago Council of Lawyers.
Strauss is a graduate magna cum laude of the Harvard Law School. He received a BPhil in politics from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude.
Paul M. Smith is Vice President of Litigation and Strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, and teaches as a Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown University Law Center. In 2012, Smith was appointed to the ACS board of directors and served as board chair from 2006 to 2008.
Smith spent more than two decades as a partner at Jenner & Block, where he chaired its Appellate and U.S. Supreme Court Practice and co-chaired the its Election Law and Redistricting Practice. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court 21 times, including the landmark gay rights case Lawrence v. Texas and a series of important voting rights cases, and prepared amicus briefs in several key campaign finance cases McCutcheon v. FEC.
The National Law Journal named Smith one of the "Decade's Most Influential Lawyers.” He has been frequently named to the DC Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, and 500 Leading Lawyers in America lists. His numerous awards include Legal Aid Society of DC’s Servant of Justice Award and the DC Bar’s Thurgood Marshall Award. He is a former co-chair of Lambda Legal.
Smith graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College, where he now sits on the board of trustees, and received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.
Dawn L. Smalls is a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block, where she currently serves as the Monitor of a tier-one global financial institution. Smalls was previously a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, and before that served as Director of Democratic Participation for the Ford Foundation, where she oversaw approximately $40 million of grantmaking focused on democracy initiatives in the U.S. Previous foundation experience also includes serving as a Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations. In 2015, Smalls was appointed to the ACS board of directors.
During the Obama Administration, Smalls served as Executive Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. She also served during the Clinton Administration as Assistant to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and as a Special Assistant in the Office of Management and Budget.
During the 2008 campaign, she served as the New York State Political Director for the Obama for America campaign and a Regional Political Director for the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.
Smalls also served as a commissioner on the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the State agency tasked with ensuring that state elected officials and lobbyists comply with the State’s ethics and lobbying laws and regulations.
Smalls received a B.A. from Boston University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.
