David Cole is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, a volunteer staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He is the author of two award-winning books, Enemy Aliens, which received the American Book Award in 2004, and No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System, which was named Best Non-Fiction Book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review, and best book on an issue of national policy in 1999 by the American Political Science Association. His most recent book, published in September 2007, is entitled Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror.

He has litigated many significant constitutional cases, including Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, which extended First Amendment protection to flagburning, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged political content restriction on NEA funding, and Massachusetts v. Sullivan, which challenged restrictions on what federally-funded family planning centers could tell women about abortion. Since 9/11, he has been involved in many of the nation’s most important cases involving civil liberties and national security.

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis has called Cole“one of the country’s great legal voices for civil liberties today,” and Nat Hentoff has called him “a one-man Committee of Correspondence in the tradition of patriot Sam Adams.” Former CIA Director James Woolsey called Cole’s book, Enemy Aliens, “the essential book in the field.” Cole has received numerous awards for his human rights work, including from the Society of American Law Teachers, the National Lawyers Guild, the ACLU of Southern California, the ABA Section on Individual Rights and Responsibilities, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Noah Feldman specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on the relationship between law and religion, constitutional design, and the history of legal theory. Professor of law at Harvard Law School, he is also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Feldman was Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005. In 2004 he was a visiting professor at Yale Law School and a fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. In 2003 he served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution. From 1999 to 2002, he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Before that he served as a law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998 to 1999) and to Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1997 to 1998).

He received his A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 1992. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. in Islamic Thought from Oxford University in 1994. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1997, serving as Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal. He is the author of three books: Divided By God: America's Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton University Press, 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).

Jane Mayer joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in March, 1995. Based in Washington, D.C., she writes about politics for the magazine, and has been covering the war on terror. Recent subjects include: Alberto Mora and the Pentagon’s secret torture policy, how the United States outsources torture (rendition), Guantanamo Bay prison, and the legality of C.I.A. interrogations. She has also written about George W. Bush, the bin Laden family, Karl Rove, and the television show 24.

Before joining The New Yorker, Mayer was for twelve years a senior writer at the Wall Street Journal. In 1984, she became the Journal’s first female reporter to cover a presidential campaign and, subsequently, its first female White House correspondent. She was also a war correspondent and a foreign correspondent for the paper. Among other stories, she covered the bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the final days of Communism in the Soviet Union. She was nominated twice by the Journal for the Pulitzer Prize in the feature writing category.

Before joining the Journal in 1982, Mayer worked as a metropolitan reporter for the Washington Star. She began her career in journalism as a stringer for Time magazine while still a student in college. She has also written for a number of other publications, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Review of Books.

Mayer is the co-author of two books. Strange Justice, written with Jill Abramson, was published in 1994 by Houghton Mifflin and was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction. Her first book, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, co-authored by Doyle McManus, was a best-selling account of the Reagan White House’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.