Speaker biographies

Theodore H. Frank is a resident fellow at AEI and director of the AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest. He manages the Institute’s research in legal studies and specializes in product liability, class actions, and civil procedure. Mr. Frank has testified before Congress multiple times, including before the U.S House Committee on Financial Services about the Milberg Weiss indictment. Before joining AEI, Mr. Frank was a litigator from 1995 to 2005 and clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Frank has written for law reviews, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The American Spectator and has testified before Congress multiple times on legal issues. He writes for the award-winning legal blogs PointOfLaw.com and Overlawyered, and the Wall Street Journal has called him a “leading tort-reform advocate.”

Michael A. Perino is currently the Dean George W. Matheson Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law in New York. Mr. Perino’s primary areas of scholarly interest are securities regulation and litigation, corporations, and judicial decision-making. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell Law School (2005); the Justin W. D’Atri Visiting Professor of Law, Business and Society at Columbia Law School (2002); and a lecturer and codirector of the Roberts Program in Law, Business, and Corporate Governance at Stanford Law School (1995–98). Mr. Perino has authored numerous articles on securities regulation, securities fraud, and class action litigation. Congress relied on the empirical findings of his article “Fraud and Federalism: Preempting Private State Securities Fraud Causes of Action,” published in the Stanford Law Review in 1998, in enacting the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998. He is the author of the leading treatise on the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Securities Litigation After the Reform Act (CCH, 2000). He has testified in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and is frequently quoted in the media on securities and corporate matters. The Securities and Exchange Commission has retained Mr. Perino to provide it with a report and recommendations on the adequacy of arbitrator conflict disclosure requirements in securities arbitration. Mr. Perino was also one of the principal developers of Stanford Law School’s Securities Class Action Clearinghouse.

Peter J. Wallison holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Policy Studies at AEI, where he codirects the Institute’s program on financial market deregulation. He previously practiced banking, corporate, and financial law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Washington and New York. From June 1981 to January 1985, Mr. Wallison was general counsel of the Treasury Department, where he had a significant role in the development of the Reagan administration’s proposals for deregulation in the financial services industry. He also served as general counsel to the Depository Institutions Deregulation Committee and participated in the Treasury Department’s efforts to deal with the debt held by less-developed countries. During 1986–87, Mr. Wallison was White House counsel to President Ronald Reagan. Between 1972 and 1976, Mr. Wallison served first as special assistant to New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and, subsequently, as counsel to Mr. Rockefeller when he was vice president of the United States.

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