Speaker biographies

Christopher DeMuth is the D.C. Searle Senior Fellow at AEI and was president from December 1986 through December 2008. He was previously the managing director of Lexecon Inc., a law-and-economics consulting firm; the editor and publisher of Regulation magazine; the administrator for regulatory affairs at the Office of Management and Budget and executive director of the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief in the Reagan administration; a lecturer and director of regulatory studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; an attorney with the Consolidated Rail Corporation and with the law firm of Sidley & Austin; and a staff assistant to President Richard M. Nixon. He is a director of the State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company and two family firms. Mr. DeMuth's essays have appeared in The American Enterprise, Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of Regulation, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and other publications.

Philip K. Howard is the vice chairman of Covington & Burling LLP and founder of Common Good, a national bipartisan coalition organized to restore common sense to American law. With the cooperation of a number of nonprofit organizations, including Public Agenda, Mr. Howard founded NewTalk.org in 2008. NewTalk.org presents focused discussions by experts on the most important domestic topics shaping American society today. He is the author of the bestselling book The Death of Common Sense and The Collapse of the Common Good (Ballantine Books, 2002) and he is a periodic contributor to the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Mr. Howard advises leaders of both parties on legal and regulatory reform issues, and wrote the introduction to Vice President Al Gore's book, Common Sense Government. His forthcoming book, Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans from Too Much Law, will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. this year.

Jeffrey Rosen is a professor of law at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. His most recent book is The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America (Times Books, 2007). He also is the author of The Most Democratic Branch (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Naked Crowd (Random House, 2004), and The Unwanted Gaze (Random House, 2000). Mr. Rosen's essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and on National Public Radio. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the ten best magazine journalists in America and the Los Angeles Times called him, "the nation's most widely read and influential legal commentator."

Dick Thornburgh serves as an active adviser and counselor to government affairs clients at K&L Gates. During his over twenty-five years in public service he has served as the governor of Pennsylvania, the attorney general of the United States under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and the under-secretary-general at the United Nations. He was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1978, reelected in 1982, and was the first Republican to ever serve two successive terms in that office. Mr. Thornburgh served as the chair of the Republican Governors Association and was named by his fellow governors as one of the nation's most effective big-state governors in a 1986 Newsweek poll. After his unanimous confirmation by the Senate, Mr. Thornburgh served three years as the attorney general (1988-91). The Legal Times noted that he "built a reputation as one of the most effective champions that prosecutors have ever had." He currently chairs a panel of the National Academy of Public Administration examining the transformation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 2004, Washingtonian magazine named him one of Washington's top criminal defense lawyers.

Stephen F. Williams is a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in June 1986 and took senior status in September 2001. Previously, 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 UCLA, the University of Chicago Law School, and Southern Methodist University and was a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States and the Federal Trade Commission.

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