Presidential Speaker Series

Steven Teles
Johns Hopkins University
September 11, 2024

Steven Teles is Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for Economy and Society (SNF Agora) at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. Professor Teles is the author of five books, including The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (2008) and The Captured Economy (2017).

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Keith Whittington
Yale Law School
November 20, 2024

Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Whittington’s teaching and scholarship span American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. He is the author of You Can't Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms (2024), Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (2019), and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018), as well as Constitutional Interpretation (1999), Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy (2007), and other works on constitutional theory and law and politics.

Whittington has spent most of his career at Princeton University, where he served as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics from 2006 to 2024. He has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas School of Law.

Whittington serves as Founding Chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance’s Academic Committee and as a Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow. He has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, an American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, a National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. A member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, Whittington served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin, Whittington has written extensively for a general audience. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and hosts The Academic Freedom Podcast.

Jean Twenge
San Diego State University
March 12, 2025

Jean M. Twenge, Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of more than 190 scientific publications and seven books, including Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future and iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. Dr. Twenge frequently gives talks and seminars on generational differences and raising children in the digital age based on a dataset of 42 million people. Her audiences have included parents, military personnel, college faculty and staff, high school teachers, camp directors, and corporate executives. Her research has been covered in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and The Washington Post, and she has been featured on Today, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Fox and Friends, NBC Nightly News, Real Time with Bill Maher, and National Public Radio. She holds a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She publishes her latest analyses and updates on the Generation Tech substack.

Jamal Greene
Columbia Law
May 21, 2025

Jamal Greene is a constitutional law expert whose scholarship focuses on the structure of legal and constitutional argument. He teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, the law of the political process, First Amendment, and federal courts. 

Greene is the author of the book How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart (HMH, March 2021). He is also the author of numerous law review articles and has written in-depth about the Supreme Court, constitutional rights adjudication, and the constitutional theory of originalism, including “Rights as Trumps?” (Harvard Law Review foreword for the 2017–2018 Supreme Court term), “Rule Originalism” (Columbia Law Review, 2016), and “The Anticanon” (Harvard Law Review, 2011), an examination of Supreme Court cases now considered examples of weak constitutional analysis, such as Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson.

During the 2018–2019 academic year, Greene served as senior visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, where he commissioned and oversaw new scholarly research relating to free speech and new communications platforms. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and has served as Columbia Law’s Vice Dean for Intellectual Life. 

Greene is a sought-after media commentator on the Supreme Court and on constitutional law. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, New York Daily News, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2019, he served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Ca.) during the Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Before training as a lawyer, he was a baseball reporter for Sports Illustrated.

Prior to joining Columbia Law in 2008, Greene was the Alexander Fellow at New York University School of Law. He served as a law clerk to Judge Guido Calabresi on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the American Law Institute and sits on the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society.