October 18, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Akhil Reed Amar is Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches constitutional law, criminal procedure, and federal jurisdiction. A former clerk for Judge 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 extensively on constitutional issues for lay audiences in for a such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The American Lawyer, and Slate. This two most recent books are The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale University Press, 1998) and Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (editor, with Paul Brest, Sanford Levinson, and J.M. Balkin) (Aspen 2000).

Walter Berns is the John H. Olin University Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has also taught at the University of Toronto and at Cornell and Yale Universities. His government service includes membership on the National Council on the Humanities, the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress, and the Judicial Fellows Commission. In 1983, he was a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. He has been a Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Fellow and a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer. He is the author of numerous articles on American government in both professional and popular journals; his books include In Defense of Liberal Democracy (AEI Press, 1984), Taking the Constitution Seriously (Simon and Schuster, 1987), and Making Patriots (University of Chicago Press, 2001). He was the editor of the first and second editions of After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at the America Enterprise Institute. He is executive director of the Continuity of Government Commission and was project manager of the Transition to Governing Project. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Boston College, and Harvard University. He is the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles. Most recently, he has coauthored "Presidential Succession and Presidential Leaders," Catholic University Law Review (Fall 2004); "The Absentee Ballot and the Secret Ballot: Challenges for Election Reform," University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform (Spring 2003); and "President Bush: Legislative Strategist," in The Bush Presidency (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. He is a frequent radio and television commentator on the presidency, Congress, and elections.

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