The Future of Equality, Liberty, and the U.S. Constitution

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Balkin writes political and legal commentary at the weblog Balkinization.

He is the founder and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and the new information technologies.

Ann Beeson is a distinguished social justice lawyer and a zealous advocate for the transformative power of culture. She is currently a senior fellow with the Open Society Foundations. Having worked as an executive in law and philanthropy for many years, she is dedicating the next phase of her career to pursuing two of her passions: expanding support for the role that culture plays in social change and building the progressive base in her home state of Texas. She recently moved back to Austin from New York City with her family.

Beeson was the executive director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Foundations from 2007 to 2011. At the Foundations, she launched programs to strengthen government transparency and address the crisis in journalism, increase the capacity of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab organizations to advocate on their own behalf, and advance achievement for African-American men and boys. 

Ann was previously the national associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked from 1995-2007. She argued twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, litigated numerous cases around the country, and launched groundbreaking programs to stop the erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security and to expand the use of international human rights strategies in the areas of immigrants' rights, women's rights, and racial justice.

In June 2007, Beeson was named one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America by the National Law Journal. Ann was a law clerk for the Honorable Barefoot Sanders, then chief judge for the Northern District of Texas. She holds a law degree from Emory University and a master's degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas.

Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. She teaches Civil Procedure, Legal Writing, and a seminar on Reparations, Reconciliation and Restorative Justice.

Ifill co-founded with Professor Michael Pinard the Reentry of Ex-Offenders Clinic. Prior to joining the faculty in 1993, Ifill served as an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. in New York, where she litigated voting rights cases, including Houston Lawyers’ Association v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court held that judicial elections are subject to the provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

Ifill is author of the book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. She is an Open Society Institute board member.

Pamela Karlan is Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School. She is also the founding director of the school’s successful Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the court.

One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Karlan is the co-author of three casebooks on constitutional law and related subjects, as well as more than four dozen scholarly articles. She is a widely recognized commentator on legal issues.

John Payton is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Payton has most recently been a partner at the Washington firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr. His practice there ranged from complex commercial matters to the most challenging of civil rights matters. He was the lead counsel for the University of Michigan in successfully defending the use of race in the admissions process at its undergraduate college and at its law school. Payton handled these two high-profile cases in the trial court, in the court of appeals and argued Gratz v. Bollinger in the Supreme Court.

From 1991 to 1994, Payton served as the corporation counsel of the District of Columbia. He headed the firm's litigation department from 1998 to 2000. Payton served as president of the District of Columbia Bar from June 2001 to June 2002.

Cesar Perales is president and director-counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. He was one of three founders of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1972. Since then Perales has moved between public and private sectors, returning to PRLDEF in 1981 and then again in 2005.

Outside of PRLDEF, Perales has served as assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services; as commissioner of the Department of Social Services under Governor Mario M. Cuomo; and deputy mayor of New York City during the administration of David N. Dinkins. In the private sector Perales served as senior vice president of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, where he established the hospital’s community health program.

Cristina Rodriguez is associate professor of law at NYU School of Law. She is writing a series of papers exploring how the constitutional and statutory law governing immigration contributes to managing the social change implicated by the large-scale movements of people across borders.

Her recent works include The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation, The Citizenship Paradox in a Transnational Age, and Guest Workers and Integration. She also recently completed a series of pieces concerning language rights and language policy in the United States and around the world.

Rodríguez received her JD from Yale Law School, where she served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal and won the Benjamin Sharps Prize for the best paper by a third-year student. Rodríguez then clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. She began her work on the law of language between clerkships as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School.

Reva Siegel is deputy dean and the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale University. Siegel’s writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality, and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution.

She is currently writing on the role of social movement conflict in guiding constitutional change, addressing this question in recent articles on reproductive rights, originalism and the Second Amendment, the "de facto ERA," and the enforcement of Brown.