Speaker biographies

Gerard Alexander is a visiting scholar at AEI, and is on sabbatical as an associate professor of political science at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the growth of government, and ways in which its role has been limited or reduced in taxes, regulation, and spending programs. His research also examines America's policy of democratization abroad and the conditions for stable democracy. Mr. Alexander is author of The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Cornell University Press, 2002). He has written about the role of electoral laws and other institutions in several scholarly articles and academic papers, including Comparative Political Studies and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He has also written articles on democratization in other venues such as the National Interest and The Weekly Standard.

Walter Berns is a resident scholar at AEI and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University. Mr. Berns studies political philosophy, constitutional law, and legal issues. He has taught at the University of Toronto, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and Yale University. His government service includes membership on the National Council on the Humanities, the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress, the Judicial Fellows Commission, and in 1983 he was the alternate United States representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He has been a Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Fellow. He is the author of many books and articles on American government and politics, including Democracy and the Constitution (AEI Press, 2006) and Making Patriots (University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Jean-Claude Bonichot is a judge at the European Court of Justice. Before his appointment in October 2006, he was president of the Sixth Subdivision of the Judicial Division at the Council of State. He has authored numerous publications on administrative law, community law, and European human rights law. He is the founder and chairman of the editorial committee of the Bulletin de jurisprudence de droit de l’urbanisme. From 1998 through 2000, Judge Bonichot was a lecturer at the University of Metz.

François-Henri Briard is an attorney before the Supreme Courts of France with the law firm Briard, Delaporte et Trichet, chairman of the Paris chapter of the Federalist Society, and president of the Vergennes Society, which he cofounded with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Mr. Briard is an auditor at the French National Institute for Defense High Studies. He has written many lectures and contributions dealing with the friendship between the United States and France. Mr. Briard is a knight of the Legion of Honor and knight of the French National Merit. He is also a member of honor of the Sons of the American Revolution.

William Galston is the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in governance studies and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Galston specializes in issues of American public philosophy and political institutions. Prior to joining Brookings in 2006, he was the Saul Stern Professor and dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is working on several high-profile projects pertaining to core questions of American public philosophy. He is the author of eight books, including his most recent book Public Matters: Politics, Policy, and Religion in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Mr. Galston is also a coauthor of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). He is the author more than one hundred articles on questions of political and moral philosophy, American politics, and public policy.

Robert Gasaway is a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. He has represented and advised corporate clients on a wide variety of matters before federal courts, state courts, federal administrative agencies, and federal and state legislative bodies. Mr. Gasaway focuses his practice on appellate litigation, representing clients in the preparation of integrated, multiforum trial, and appellate strategies in high risk sets of related cases.

Michael S. Greve is the John G. Searle Scholar at AEI. His research and writing cover constitutional law, federalism, and business regulation. Mr. Greve cofounded and, from 1989 to 2000, directed the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm that served as counsel in many precedent-setting constitutional cases, including United States v. Morrison and Rosenberger v. University of Virginia. He also serves on the board of directors of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His publications include numerous law review articles and books, including The Demise of Environmentalism in American Law (AEI Press, 1996) and Real Federalism: Why It Matters, How It Could Happen (AEI Press, 1999.) Mr. Greve is the coeditor, with Fred L. Smith, of Environmental Politics: Public Costs, Private Rewards (Praeger, 1992) and, with Richard A. Epstein, of Competition Laws in Conflict: Antitrust Jurisdiction in the Global Economy (AEI Press, 2004) and Federal Preemption: States’ Powers, National Interests (AEI Press, 2007).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a resident fellow at AEI. At AEI, Ms. Hirsi Ali researches the relationship between the West and Islam; women’s rights in Islam; violence against women propagated by religious and cultural arguments; and Islam in Europe. An outspoken defender of women’s rights in Islamic societies, Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, where she escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992, and served as a member of the Dutch parliament from 2003 to 2006. In parliament, she worked on furthering the integration of non-Western immigrants into Dutch society, and on defending the rights of women in Dutch-Muslim society. In 2004, together with director Theo van Gogh, she made Submission, a film about the oppression of women in conservative Islamic cultures. The airing of the film on Dutch television resulted in the assassination of van Gogh by an Islamic extremist.

Josef Joffe is the publisher and editor of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, an adjunct professor of political science at Stanford University, and a distinguished fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His areas of interest are U.S. foreign policy, international security policy, European-American relations, Europe and Germany, and the Middle East. Previously, he was a columnist and editorial page editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung. His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide number of publications including the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and the Prospect (London). His scholarly work has appeared in many books and journals, such as Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, International Security, and Foreign Policy, as well as in professional journals in Germany, Britain, and France. He is the author of The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States and the Burdens of Alliance (Ballinger, 1987). His most recent book is Über-Power: The Imperial Temptation in American Foreign Policy (W.W. Norton, 2007).

Juergen Kaube has been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper since 1998. Mr. Kaube is also a professor of sociology at the University Lucerne in Switzerland. He is responsible for higher education, sciences, and the humanities. Previously, Mr. Kaube studied economics, philosophy, German literature, and art history at the Free University of Berlin. He has also served as an assistant professor for sociology at the University of Bielefeld.

Markus Kotzur is a professor of law at the University of Leipzig, where he serves as chair of public international law, European law, and foreign public law. Mr. Kotzur is the author of numerous articles, including “Decisive for the World--on Rationality and Legitimacy Regarding the Resolutions of the UN Security Council” in the 2007 edition of the Annual Book of Current Public Law.

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff is the senior director for policy programs at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where he oversees foreign and economic policy and its fellowship programs. Previously, Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff was the Washington bureau chief of Die Zeit. An expert on transatlantic relations and foreign policy, he has been called upon to provide expertise as a witness before U.S. Congress and he has appeared as a frequent commentator on transatlantic and U.S.-German affairs.

Martin Klingst is the Washington bureau chief for the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit. Previously, he worked for the North German Television and Broadcasting Corporation, and taught German law at the University of Hamburg. He has covered many constitutional and supreme courts and the Balkan Wars for Die Zeit. Mr. Klingst was a Bucerius Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2006.

R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College, where his research and writing focuses on the intersection of law and politics. His current research project focuses on how the Rehnquist Court reshaped our governing institutions. He is the author of Regulation and the Courts (Brookings Institution Press, 1983) and Between the Lines (Brookings, 1994). Mr. Melnick is cochair of the Harvard University program on constitutional government and a past president of the New England Political Science Association. Before coming to Boston College 1997, he taught at Harvard University and then Brandeis University, where he served as chair of the politics department.

Henry Olsen is vice president and director of the National Research Initiative (NRI) at AEI. He disseminates and publicizes the Institute's work to the academic community, works with AEI's visiting, adjunct, and NRI fellows, commissions and supervises NRI projects, and oversees the production of NRI publications. Prior to joining AEI, Mr. Olsen was vice president for programs at the Manhattan Institute. He was also a judicial clerk to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Ashley Parrish is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP, and a member of the firm’s appellate litigation practice. His practice focuses on appellate litigation and administrative law, the preparation of high-risk cases for eventual appeal, and strategic, complex litigation. He is an expert in legal reform and constitutional issues. Mr. Parrish has handled appeals involving a wide range of subject matters in courts all across the country, including significant matters before the U.S. Supreme Court, a variety of state appellate courts, and numerous U.S. Courts of Appeals. Mr. Parrish regularly advises clients in federal administrative law and practice. Before joining Kirkland, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable Emilio M. Garza on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (1998-1999).

Marc F. Plattner is coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, vice-president for research and studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and codirector of the International Forum for Democratic Studies. He served as NED's director of program from 1984 to 1989. He was a visiting professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2002. He has previously been a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (1983–84), an adviser on economic and social affairs at the U.S. mission to the United Nations (1981–83), program officer at the Century Foundation (1975–81), and managing editor of The Public Interest, a quarterly journal on public policy (1971–75). His articles on a wide range of international and public policy issues have appeared in numerous books and journals. Mr. Plattner is the author of numerous books, most recently, Democracy without Borders? Global Challenges to Liberal Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and the editor of Human Rights in Our Time (Westview, 1984).

Robert von Rimscha is national spokesperson and communications director for the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP), Germany’s centrist liberal party. He is also editor in chief of Liberale Depesche, a monthly German political magazine. Before joining politics in August 2004, he was Berlin bureau chief for the daily Der Tagesspiegel. Mr. von Rimscha served as its U.S. correspondent from 1996 to 2000. Mr. von Rimscha is the author of eight books on current international politics, most recently family biographies of the Kennedys and the Bushs, which have been translated into several languages. He regularly appears on German and American media outlets and has contributed editorial writing to, among other publications, the Los Angeles Times and the International Herald Tribune. He was awarded the Arthur F. Burns Prize for distinguished commentary on transatlantic issues in 2003.

Bernd Rüthers is professor emeritus at Konstanz University. One of post-war Germany’s most distinguished and prolific legal scholars, Mr. Ruethers is the author of over forty books and hundreds of articles on legal theory, jurisprudence, civil law, and labor law. Previously, he was a professor of law at the Free University of Berlin (1967-1971) and Konstanz University, where he also served as rector (1991-1996). From 1976 to 1989, he served as an appellate judge on the Oberlandesgericht, provincial court of appeals. He was a fellow at the Scientific Collegium in Berlin and a member of the boards of several private institutions, including the Stiftung Demoskopie Allensbach. Mr. Ruethers is the recipient of the Hans-Constantin-Paulssen Prize (1967), the Ludwig Erhard Prize (1990), the Hanns Martin Schleyer Prize, and honorary doctorates from Lublin Catholic University and Jasi University in Romania.

Susan Rose-Ackerman is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale University and the Yale Law School. She is also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at Collegium Budapest, where she codirects a project on honesty and trust in post-socialist societies. She has taught and written widely on corruption, law and development, administrative law, law and regulatory policy, the nonprofit sector, and federalism. Her most recent books are Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and From Elections to Democracy: Building Accountable Government in Hungary and Poland (Cambridge, 2007). Ms. Rose-Ackerman has also been a visiting research scholar at the World Bank.

Peter H. Schuck is the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he has served as deputy dean and has held the chair since 1984. His major fields of teaching and research are tort law; immigration, citizenship, and refugee law; groups, diversity, and law; and administrative law. He has written numerous books, including, Foundations of Administrative Law Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance (Belknap Press, 2006) and The Limits of Law: Essays on Democratic Governance (Westview, 2000). His most recent book, written with James Q. Wilson, is Understanding America (PublicAffairs, 2008). He is a member of the American Law Institute’s advisory committee for the restatement of torts, basic principles, and a contributing editor to The American Lawyer. Previously, he was principal deputy assistant secretary for planning and evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Peter Skerry is a professor of political science at Boston College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where his research focuses on social policy, racial and ethnic politics, and immigration. He is also a member of the advisory council on European and transatlantic issues at the Heinrich Böll Foundation of Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, the German Green Party. He serves on the editorial board of American Politics Research and on the board of advisory editors of Society magazine. Previously, Mr. Skerry has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, served as director of Washington programs for the University of California at Los Angeles’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy, a research fellow at AEI, and legislative director for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.). His writings on politics, racial and ethnic issues, immigration, and social policy have appeared in a variety of scholarly and general interest publications, including Society, Publius, the Journal of Policy History, The New Republic, Slate, The Public Interest, The Wilson Quarterly, National Review, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His book, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (Harvard University Press, 1995), was awarded the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most recent book is Counting on the Census? Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics (Brookings Institution Press, 2000).

Kenneth W. Starr is dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law, where he teaches current constitutional issues and civil procedure. Mr. Starr’s areas of expertise are constitutional law, federal courts, federal jurisdiction, and antitrust. While in private practice, he was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In addition to working in the private sector, he has served as counselor to Attorney General William French Smith; judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit; solicitor general of the United States; and independent counsel on the Whitewater matter. As solicitor general, he argued twenty-five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Starr is a member of numerous professional organizations and boards, including the American Law Institute, the Supreme Court Historical Society, and the American Inns of Court. He has authored many law review articles and his best-selling book is First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life (Grand Central Publishing, 2003).

Francesca Strumia is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law Schoo, where she writes on issues relating to free movement, citizenship, and immigration in the European Union. She also teaches E.U. law as an adjunct professor at New England School of Law. Since 2007, Ms. Strumia has been president of the Harvard European Law Association. Her article “Citizenship and Free Movement: European and American Perspectives on a Judicial Formula for Increased Comity” has been published in 2006 in the Columbia Journal of European Law.

Adam Tomkins has been the John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow since 2003. He previously taught at King's College London (1991-2000) and at the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow and tutor in law at St. Catherine's College (2000-2003). He is a specialist in constitutional law, especially British constitutional law, but he has also published on E.U. law, comparative constitutional law, and administrative law. His books include Public Law (Oxford University Press, 2003), Our Republican Constitution (Hart Publishing, 2005), and British Government and the Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is currently working on projects concerning constitutional law and national security, republican constitutionalism in theory and practice, and the idea of the mixed constitution.

Stephen F. Williams was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in June 1986, and took senior status in September 2001. Judge Williams was engaged in private practice from 1962 to 1966 and became an assistant U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York in 1966. From 1969 until his appointment to the bench, Judge Williams taught at the University of Colorado School of Law. During this time, he also served as a visiting professor of law at the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Chicago Law School, and the Southern Methodist University. He was also a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Federal Trade Commission.

Diane P. Wood is a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School. Perviously, she clerked for Judge Irving L. Goldberg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (1975-76), and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court (1976-77). Judge Wood spent a brief period at the Office of the Legal Adviser in the U.S. Department of State. In 1980, she began her career as a legal academic at Georgetown University Law Center. She moved to the University of Chicago Law School in 1981, serving as a full time professor until 1995 and as associate dean from 1989 through 1992. In 1990, she was named to the Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professorship in International Legal Studies, becoming the first woman to hold a named chair at the school. From 1993 until her appointment to the Seventh Circuit in 1995, she served as deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Judge Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is on the council of the American Law Institute.

Michael Zöller is a professor of political sociology at Bayreuth University, president of the American-European Council on Public Policy, and an adjunct professor of government at the Catholic University of America. Previously, he was a junior editor with Bayerischer Rundfunk and then with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He serves on the board of the Mont Pelerin Society and received fellowships from Notre Dame University, the University of Chicago, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the International Center of Economic Research, the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and the University of Erfurt. He has published mainly on social thought including political economy, comparative public policy, sociology of religion, and the American polity.

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