Speaker biographies

Edward Blum is a visiting fellow at AEI and the director of the Project on Fair Representation. Mr. Blum studies civil rights policy issues such as voting rights, affirmative action, and multiculturalism. Prior to joining AEI, he facilitated the legal challenge to dozens of racially gerrymandered voting districts, race-based school admissions, and public contracting programs throughout the nation. Mr. Blum is currently working on a forthcoming book from the AEI Press, How It Works in the Real World: The Consequences of the Voting Rights Act on Voting and Elections.

Curt Levey is the executive director of the Committee for Justice, which promotes constitutionalist judicial nominees to the federal courts. Previously, Mr. Levey served as general counsel of the committee. Before joining the Committee for Justice, he served as director of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Rights, and headed the Title IX policy group at the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Mr. Levey also clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Michele Roberts is a partner at Akin Gump law firm in Washington, DC, a practice that focuses on complex civil and white-collar criminal litigation before state and federal courts and in administrative proceedings. Before entering private practice, Ms. Roberts served in the office of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she was ultimately named chief of the office’s trial division. She is a fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers and a member of the District of Columbia Bar, the American Bar Association, the National Bar Association, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Ms. Roberts is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at Harvard Law School and also serves on the District of Columbia Advisory Commission on Sentencing.

Richard Sander is a professor at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses in property, quantitative methods, urban housing, and policy analysis. In 2004, he published a comprehensive study of affirmative action in American law schools, focusing particularly on the ways in which large preferences imposed unexpected but substantial costs on their intended beneficiaries. At UCLA, Sanders has studied housing segregation, the reasons behind the American legal profession’s explosive growth since the mid-1960s, and the structure and effects of law school admissions policies.

Shirley Wilcher is president and CEO of Wilcher Global, LLC Diversity Consulting, a consulting firm that specializes in diversity management, affirmative action, contract compliance, and government relations. Ms. Wilcher recently served as executive director of Americans for a Fair Chance, a consortium of six civil rights legal organizations formed to serve as an educational resource on affirmative action. During the Bill Clinton administration, Ms. Wilcher served as deputy assistant secretary for federal contract compliance at the U.S. Department of Labor, where she enforced equal employment opportunity and affirmative action laws.

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