John McGinnis, "Campaign Finance, the First Amendment, and the Roberts Court"

With commentary by Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos

John McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern Law School. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also has an MA degree from Balliol College, Oxford, in philosophy and theology. Professor McGinnis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. From 1987 to 1991, he was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. He the author of Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Government Through Technology (Princeton 2013) and Originalism and the Good Constitution (Harvard 2013) (with M. Rappaport). He is a past winner of Paul Bator award given by the Federalist Society to an outstanding academic under 40. He has been listed by the United States on the roster of panelists who may be called upon to decide World Trade Organization Disputes.

Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos’ research and teaching interests include election law, constitutional law, legislation, administrative law, comparative law, and local government law. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of International Law. He also has an MPhil in European Studies from Cambridge University. Professor Stephanopoulis clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Before joining the Law School faculty, he was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Jenner & Block LLP, where his practice focused on complex federal litigation, appellate advocacy, and election law. His academic work has appeared in, among others, the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, NYU Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He often writes about law and politics for popular publications, and is involved as well in several policy reform initiatives. He has been named to the National Law Journal’s “Chicago’s 40 Under 40.”

Presented on December 2, 2015, by the Federalist Society.