Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, coercive plea bargaining, police accountability, and gun rights. Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement. Neily is an adjunct professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public‐ interest law. He served as co‐ counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun. Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. Neily received a BA in Plan II (with concentrations in philosophy and Russian) from the University of Texas at Austin, and he received his law degree from the University of Texas, where he was chief articles editor of the Texas Law Review.

Steven J. Heyman attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he served as a Supreme Court editor of the Harvard Law Review.  After graduating in 1984, he worked as a law clerk to Judge Harry T. Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and then as an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Shea & Gardner.  In 1989, he joined the faculty of Chicago-Kent, where he teaches criminal law, torts, legislation, constitutional law, and the First Amendment.  In 2016, he received the law school’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.  He has also been a visiting law professor at the University of Colorado, Vanderbilt, and Indiana University–Bloomington. Professor Heyman is a leading First Amendment scholar who has written extensively on the foundations and limits of freedom of expression.  His books include Free Speech and Human Dignity (Yale University Press 2008) and a two-volume anthology entitled Hate Speech and the Constitution (Garland/Rutledge 1996).  He has written many law review articles on topics ranging from hate speech and pornography to funeral picketing to the First Amendment jurisprudence of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  In recent years, he has published a series of articles on religious freedom and the Constitution.  In addition to the First Amendment, Professor Heyman’s work explores many other aspects of constitutional law and legal philosophy, including affirmative rights, the meaning of the Second Amendment, whether there should be a legal duty to rescue, and the legal and political thought of Aristotle, Locke, and Hegel. Professor Heyman was elected to the American Law Institute in 1998, and serves on the Board of Advisors of the Chicago Lawyers Chapter of the American Constitution Society. 

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