Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard was the most important decision on affirmative action in generations, banning preferential treatment based on race in higher education admissions. How are colleges and universities complying with SFFA? What else will be necessary in order to ensure compliance? What does the next generation of cases look like? Outside of higher education, what will be the effect of SFFA? Does it apply to employment and contracting? Does it apply to gender as well as race? What does it say about disparate impact?
Featuring:

Prof. Peter Arcidiacono, William Henry Glasson Professor of Economics, Duke University
Prof. David Bernstein, University Professor of Law; Executive Director, Liberty & Law Center, George Mason University
Prof. Kyle Rozema, Professor of Law, Co-Director of the JD/PhD Program and Academic Placement, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Prof. Sonja Starr, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law & Criminology, University of Chicago Law School
Moderator: Hon. Lisa Branch, Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

The 2024 National Lawyers Convention will take place November 14-16, 2024 at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC. The topic of the conference is "Group Identity and the Law." The conference will conclude with the annual Hon. Robert H. Bork Memorial Lecture, featuring remarks by Prof. Stephen Sachs.
Featuring:

Prof. Stephen Sachs, Antonin Scalia Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

RESOLVED: That Congress Can Ban TikTok
Featuring:

Mr. Miguel Estrada, Partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Mr. Patrick Philbin, Partner, Torridon Law PLLC
Moderator: Prof. Eugene Volokh, Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA School of Law

Artificial Intelligence is now part of daily life. AI has improved efficiency, predicted outcomes with accuracy, and even created innovations. At the same time, however, AI and its capabilities are evolving faster than the laws and regulations governing its use. AI presents new challenges to intellectual property—from inventorship and authorship issues to liability. This panel will explore the intersection of AI and Intellectual Property rights. In the copyright context, it must be determined who is the owner of AI-generated works to whether it is fair use to train AI models using copyrighted works. In the patent context, it must be determined whether AI can be an inventor and whether AI can or should be used to assist in the drafting of patents. It is also not settled who has the power to regulate AI—the USPTO and other federal agencies, or only Congress? These are all questions that will eventually be answered by the courts or legislation. This panel will explore these questions and more as it looks to try and answer how we can move forward in a world filled with AI while ensuring the protection of intellectual property rights.
Featuring:

Mr. Jordan Gimbel, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft
Hon. Melissa Holyoak, Commissioner, Federal Trade Commission
Hon. Darrell Issa, United States Representative (CA 48th District)
Hon. Paul Redmond Michel, Former Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Moderator: Hon. Ryan T. Holte, United States Court of Federal Claims & Jurist-In-Residence Professor of Law, The University of Akron School of Law

In the twentieth century, state supreme courts and legislatures limited the practice of law to licensed law school graduates and prevented nonlawyers from investing in law firms. This regulatory structure has not yielded a sufficient supply of affordable legal services to keep pace with demand: despite government and charitable funding and pro bono work, over 90% of the basic civil legal needs of low-income Americans now go unmet.
As lawyers have taken an interest in regulatory reform in this century, some have begun to scrutinize our own profession and explore whether innovative structural changes can help close this justice gap. The experts on this panel will equip attendees to consider reform in their states by examining the pros and cons of three such changes: (1) licensing legal paraprofessionals to perform limited legal services; (2) allowing nonlawyers to invest in legal service providers; and (3) reforming legal education and licensure to increase the supply of lawyers, especially in underserved geographic and practice areas.
Featuring:

Hon. Clint Bolick, Justice, Supreme Court of Arizona
Hon. Charles Canady, Chief Justice, Florida Supreme Court
Ms. Danielle Hirsch, Managing Director, Court Consulting Division, National Center for State Courts
Ms. Lucy Ricca, Executive Director, Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, Stanford Law School
Moderator: Hon. J. Brett Busby, Justice, Texas Supreme Court

Featuring:

Ms. Rebecca Dormon, Labor Consultant, People Results
Mr. Pepper Crutcher, Partner, Balch & Bingham LLP
Mr. Bradford J. Kelley, Shareholder, Littler
Moderator: Hon. Chad A. Readler, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit

Last term, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Rahimi, which built upon the text-first, history-second methodology articulated by the Supreme Court in Heller and reaffirmed in Bruen. Many hot button Second Amendment issues are percolating through the lower courts and are likely to reach this Supreme Court in the coming terms. This panel will discuss Rahimi's impact on the text and history methodology as applied to legal challenges to "gun free zones", bans on semi-automatic rifles and "high capacity" magazines, age restrictions, and restrictions on misdemeanants. The panel will also discuss several important methodological issues that are common to many Second Amendment litigations, including the debate whether 1791 or 1868 is the correct time to determine the meaning of the Second Amendment.
Featuring:

Prof. William Merkel, Associate Professor, Charleston School of Law
Mr. Mark W. Smith, Senior Fellow, Ave Maria School of Law and Host of the Four Boxes Diner Second Amendment Channel
Mr. David Thompson, Partner, Cooper & Kirk
Moderator: Hon. Amul Thapar, Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit

The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination on the basis of sex in employment. In addition, in 1972, The Higher Education Act was amended to prohibit the exclusion of any person from any federally funded educational program or activity on the basis of sex. These seemingly simple prohibitions have recently been the focus of considerable attention. How, for example, do they apply to individuals whose gender identity is seemingly at odds with their biological sex? What does the Bostock decision say about their situation? Is a federally funded school required to assign bathrooms, showers, changing rooms, and sleeping quarters based on gender identity? Is an employer required to do so? If not required, is it permissible for these entities to do so under the law? What about athletics? What about prisons? And quite apart from what the law is now, what should it be? What about what is often called “gender affirming” treatment? Should a parent be able to obtain such treatment for a child? Should a parent be able to refuse it? What is the role of schools? Should the government be obligated to fund “gender affirming” care for prisoners or individuals on relief? Finally, does or should the law require others to accept a person’s preferred gender identity—at work, at school, elsewhere—and/or adjust their speech to reflect that identity?
Featuring:

Prof. Doriane Coleman, Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law, Duke Law School
Ms. Erin Hawley, Senior Counsel, Vice President of Center for Life & Regulatory Practice, Alliance Defending Freedom
Hon. Andrea Lucas, Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Prof. Sarath Sanga, Professor of Law & Co-Director, Center for the Study of Corporate Law, Yale Law School
Mr. D. John Sauer, Principle, James Otis Law Group LLC; Former Solicitor General, Missouri
Moderator: Ms. Jennifer Braceras, Founder, Independent Women’s Law Center; Former Commissioner, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

(Ticketed event)
On September 11, 2001, at the age of 45 and at the height of her professional and personal life, Barbara K. Olson was murdered in the terrorist attacks against the United States as a passenger on the hijacked American Airlines flight that was flown into the Pentagon. The Federalist Society believes that it is most fitting to dedicate an annual lecture on limited government and the spirit of freedom to the memory of Barbara Olson. She had a deep commitment to the rule of law and understood well the relationship between respecting limits on government power and the preservation of freedom. And, significantly, Barbara Olson was an individual who never took freedom for granted in her own life, even in her final terrifying moments-her inspiring and energetic human spirit is a testament to what one can achieve in a world that places a premium on human freedom. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson delivered the first lecture in November 2001. The lecture series continued in following years with other notable individuals.
Featuring:

Prof. Jonathan R. Turley, J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law; Director of the Environmental Law Advocacy Center; Executive Director, Project for Older Prisoners, The George Washington University Law School

Theories of nuisance, market-share, and consumer protection liability have become increasingly popular among plaintiffs who cannot trace an alleged harm to any specific defendant. Recently, states and local governments have sought to impose market-share liability on companies based on allegedly misleading statements (or silence) about the potential effects of their products. These cases raise difficult legal issues that remain underdeveloped because the risk of a crippling damages award often pressures companies to settle claims early in litigation.
Featuring:

Mr. Theodore J. Boutrous, Partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Mr. Elbert Lin, Chair, Issues & Appeals, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP
Mr. Oramel H. Skinner, III, Executive Director, Alliance For Consumers
Moderator: Hon. William H. Pryor, Jr., Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

Much has been made of the promise and concerns around AI technical advances, and guardrails that might be considered to reduce the downside of opaque quasi-algorithmic outcomes associated with current large language model approaches. This panel will examine the current AI regulatory debate and explore how current and proposed corporate and governmental AI is being shaped and normed to provide outputs that reinforce “mainstream” economic, ideological and operational norms, with the risk of vested interests defining such norms. From national security applications, autonomous vehicle safety decisions, economic predictions, pareto-optimal and social benefit determinations, and health care deployment, to how you are entertained and educated, can we control what most of us can’t understand?
Featuring:

Mr. Stewart A. Baker, Of Counsel, Steptoe & Johnson LLP
Mr. Christopher Ekren, Global Technology Counsel, Sony Corporation of America
Ms. Victoria Luxardo Jeffries, Director, United States Public Policy, Meta
Prof. John C. Yoo, Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, University of California at Berkeley; Nonresident Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution
Moderator: Hon. Stephen Alexander Vaden, Judge, United States Court of International Trade