Panelists:
Akhil Reed Amar is the Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and a former clerk of Stephen Breyer, he has delivered endowed lectures at over two dozen universities. His many law review articles have been widely cited by scholars and judges, and he has also written widely on constitutional issues for lay audiences in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, the American Lawyer, and Slate. His two most recent books are The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998) and Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking, editor, with Paul Brest, Sanford Levinson, and J.M. Balkin (Aspen, 2000).

Robert J. Cottrol is the Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History at George Washington University. He specializes in American legal history and the study of comparative race relations. Mr. Cottrol’s research has focused on the influence of legal institutions and social processes on race relations in the United States. He has also written in the areas of criminal law and criminology, labor relations, and constitutional law. A member of the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History, he is chair of the legal history section of the Association of American Law Schools. He is the author of The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era, and editor of Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment, and From African to Yankee: Narratives of Slavery and Freedom in Antebellum New England (1998). He is currently writing a history of the school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas for the University Press of Kansas Landmark Cases in American History series.

Robert A. Goldwin is a resident scholar of constitutional studies at AEI. He has served in the White House as a special consultant to the president and, concurrently, as an adviser to the secretary of defense. He has taught political science at the University of Chicago and Kenyon College and was the dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis. He is the editor of more than twenty books on American politics, senior editor of the AEI series of volumes on the Constitution, and author of numerous articles, many of which appear in Why Blacks, Women, and Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution. His most recent book is From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constitution (AEI Press, 1997).

Sanford V. Levinson is the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and professor of government at the University of Texas. Mr. Levinson is primarily interested in constitutional law, but he also teaches and writes about professional responsibility, jurisprudence, and political theory. He is the author of Constitutional Faith (Princeton, 1988) and Written in Stone (Duke, 1998), and editor or coeditor of Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (NYU, 1998), Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (Princeton, 1995), and Interpreting Law & Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Northwestern, 1988). His many articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Constitutional Commentary, Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, and elsewhere. His recent articles include "The Canons of Constitutional Law" (Harvard Law Review, 1998). He is currently working (with Paul Brest, Akhil Amar, and J. M. Balkin) on the fourth edition of their popular casebook Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (Aspen, forthcoming). He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and NYU School of Law and is a member of the American Law Institute.

Moderator:
John C. Fortier is a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is the executive director of the Continuity of Government Commission and the project manager of the Transition to Governing Project. He is also a regular participant in "Election Watch," AEI's election analysis forum. Mr. Fortier has taught at Boston College, Harvard University, and the University of Delaware. He has published articles in the Review of Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, The University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform (forthcoming), State Legislatures Magazine, the New York Times, TechCentralStation, the Newark Star Ledger, and the Washington Times. Mr. Fortier has provided commentary for BBC radio and television, CTV (Canadian television), Fox News, C-SPAN, WBUR (NPR, Boston), WAMU (NPR, Washington), and WNYC (NPR, New York).