Speaker biographies

Yegor Gaidar was the first prime minister to serve in Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s government in 1992, and was a leading architect of Russia’s post-communist economic reforms. He also served during the early 1990s as minister of economy and finance for the Russian Federation and as counselor to President Yeltsin. Before entering politics, he worked as a journalist for Pravda and as director of the Institute of Economic Policy under the National Academy of Economics in the U.S.S.R. Since leaving the Kremlin, he was elected as a deputy to the Duma and, until 2004, acted as a co-chairman of the Union of Rightist Forces, the center-right political party. Since 1996, he has been director of the Institute of the Economy in Transition, based in Moscow. He has had several books and over a hundred articles on economic reform and post-communist transition published. He is an honorary professor at the University of California-Berkeley and the Terry Sanford Distinguished Lecturer at Duke University.

Christopher DeMuth has been president of AEI since 1986. He was previously managing director of Lexecon Inc., an economics consulting firm; editor and publisher of Regulation magazine; administrator for regulatory affairs at the Office of Management and Budget; executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration; lecturer and director of regulatory studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; an attorney with the Consolidated Rail Corporation and the law firm of Sidley & Austin; and staff assistant to President Richard Nixon. He is a director of the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Companies and two family companies. Mr. DeMuth’s essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, Commentary, The American Enterprise, and other publications.

Judge Stephen F. Williams was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1986. He previously served as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, associate professor and professor of law at the University of Colorado School of Law, visiting professor of law at the University of California–Los Angeles, visiting professor of law and fellow in law and economics at the University of Chicago Law School, visiting George W. Hutchison Professor of Energy Law at Southern Methodist University, and as a consultant to the Federal Trade Commission on energy-related issues. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the coauthor of Cases on Oil and Gas (sixth ed., 1992).

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