Events

Events

Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and director of Cato University, the Institute's educational arm. Palmer is also the executive vice president for international programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and is responsible for establishing operating programs in 14 languages and managing programs for a worldwide network of think tanks. Before joining Cato he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, and a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He frequently lectures in North America, Europe, Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, India, China and throughout Asia, and the Middle East on political science, public choice, civil society, and the moral, legal, and historical foundations of individual rights.

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Jeffrey A. Miron is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. His area of expertise is the economics of libertarianism, with particular emphasis on the economics of illegal drugs. Miron has served on the faculty at the University of Michigan and as a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management, M.I.T. and the Department of Economics, Harvard University. From 1992-1998, he was chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He is the author of Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition and The Economics of Seasonal Cycles. Miron received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Swarthmore College in 1979 and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1984.

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Robert McDonald is associate professor of history at the United States Military Academy and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his Ph.D. A specialist on Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic, he has published several essays and articles in journals such as The Historian, Southern Cultures, and the Journal of the Early Republic. He is editor of Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point (University of Virginia Press, 2004) and Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming). He is completing a book to be titled Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Personality. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and Grace.

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Under the direction of Tim Lynch, Cato's Project on Criminal Justice has become a leading voice in support of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties. His research interests include the war on terrorism, overcriminalization, the drug war, the militarization of police tactics, and gun control. In 2000, he served on the National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions. Lynch has also filed several amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court in cases involving constitutional rights. He is the editor of In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of the Criminal Law” and After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century. Lynch is a member of the Wisconsin, District of Columbia, and Supreme Court bars. He earned both a B.S. and a J.D. from Marquette University.

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David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.

He is a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism. Boaz is the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. The earlier edition of The Libertarian Mind, titled Libertarianism: A Primer, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.” His other books include The Politics of Freedom and the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

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Randy Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern and Harvard Law School. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.

In 2004, Professor Barnett appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court to argue the medical cannabis case of Gonzalez v. Raich. He lectures internationally and appears frequently on radio and television programs such as the CBS Evening News, The News Hour (PBS), Talk of the Nation (NPR), Hannity & Colmes (FOX) and the Ricki Lake Show. He delivered the Kobe 2000 lectures in jurisprudence at the University of Tokyo and Doshisha University in Kyoto.

Professor Barnett’s scholarship includes more than eighty articles and reviews, as well as eight books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2004),Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Aspen 2008), and Contracts Cases and Doctrine (Aspen, 4th ed. 2008).

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Christopher A. Preble is the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of three books including The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free (Cornell University Press, 2009); and John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); and he co-edited, with John Mueller, A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security (Cato Institute, 2014); and, with Jim Harper and Benjamin Friedman, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It (Cato Institute, 2010).

In addition to his work at Cato, Preble teaches the U.S. Foreign Policy elective at the University of California, Washington Center (UCDC). Before joining Cato in February 2003, he taught history at St. Cloud State University and Temple University. Preble was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and served onboard USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) from 1990 to 1993. Preble holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University.

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Megan McArdle is a Washington, DC-based journalist who covers economics and finance for Bloomberg View. A longtime blogger, her work has appeared at a wide array of news and opinion outlets, including The Economist, The Atlantic, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Salon, Reason, and The Guardian. McArdle is also the author of the recent book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

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Peter Van Doren is editor of the quarterly journal Regulation and an expert on the regulation of housing, land, energy, the environment, transportation, and labor. He has taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (Princeton University), the School of Organization and Management (Yale University), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 1987 to 1988 he was the postdoctoral fellow in political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. His writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Journal of Commerce, and the New York Post. Van Doren has also appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, and Voice of America.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the MIT and his master’s degree and doctorate from Yale University.

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Emily Ekins is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. Her research focuses primarily on American politics, public opinion, political psychology, and social movements, with an emphasis in survey and quantitative methods. She studies how values, experiences, and self-interest shape public opinion and attitudes toward government. Emily’s publications include “The Libertarian Roots of the Tea Party” and “Public Attitudes toward Federalism: The Public’s Preference for a Renewed Federalism.” Before joining Cato, she spent four years as the director of polling for Reason Foundation where she conducted national public opinion polls and published specialized research studies. In 2014 Emily authored an in-depth study of young Americans, “Millennials: The Politically Unclaimed Generation.” Prior to joining Reason, Emily worked as a research associate at Harvard Business School, where she coauthored several Harvard Business Case Studies and helped design and conduct research experiments and surveys.

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Susan N. Herman holds a chair as Centennial Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, where she currently teaches courses in Constitutional Law and Criminal Procedure, and seminars on Law and Literature, and Terrorism and Civil Liberties. She writes extensively on constitutional and criminal procedure topics for scholarly and other publications, ranging from law reviews and books to periodicals and on-line publications. Her current book, Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy, published by Oxford University Press in October 2011, and reissued in an expanded paperback edition in March 2014, is the winner of the 2012 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Herman received a B.A. from Barnard College as a philosophy major, and a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where she was a Note and Comment Editor on the N.Y.U. Law Review. Before entering teaching, Professor Herman was Pro Se Law Clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Staff Attorney and then Associate Director of Prisoners' Legal Services of New York.

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Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) represents Michigan’s Third District in the 114th United States Congress. He was elected to his first term on November 2, 2010.

Justin was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received his bachelor’s degree with High Honors in economics from the University of Michigan and his juris doctor from the University of Michigan Law School. He worked for his family’s business, as a business lawyer, and as a Michigan state representative

before his election to Congress.

Justin has never missed a vote in Congress or in the Michigan Legislature out of more than 4,000 roll call votes. He is leading the incorporation of Facebook and other social media into his work as an elected official by posting an explanation of every vote online, and he has set new standards for transparency and accountability.

Justin believes government overspending is one of the biggest threats to our economic health and national security, and he has introduced an innovative balanced budget amendment—the Business Cycle Balanced Budget Amendment—to control government spending and reduce the national debt. He supports a fair and simple tax code and a regulatory environment that promotes economic prosperity.

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