A leading voice in public interest law for over 30 years, Nan Aron is President of Alliance for Justice, a national association of over 100 public interest and civil rights organizations. Nan, who founded AFJ in 1979, guides the organization in its mission to ensure that all Americans have the right and opportunity to secure justice in the courts and to have their voices heard when government makes decisions that affect their lives. Nan is nationally recognized for her vast expertise in public interest law, the federal judiciary and citizen participation in public policy. She is the author of Liberty and Justice for All: Public Interest Law in the 1980s and Beyond and has appeared as an expert in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Vanity Fair and National Public Radio. She has a B.A. from Oberlin College and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve.

Senior editor at Slate. She writes “Supreme Court Dispatches” and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. She is also a contributing editor for Newsweek and a guest columnist for The New York Times. Before joining Slate as a free-lancer in 1999, she worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nevada, and clerked for Procter Hug, chief justice of the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Elle, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Washington Post. She is co-author of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World, a legal humor book. Ms. Lithwick was awarded the Online News Association’s award for online commentary in 2001. She received a B.A degree in English from Yale University in 1990 and a J.D degree from Stanford Law School in 1996.

Keith Kamisugi is the Director of Communications at the Equal Justice Society, a San Francisco-based national strategy group heightening consciousness on race and the law. At EJS, Keith is responsible for media relations, online strategies and developing communications coalitions and alliances. He is a former chairman of the Young Democrats of Hawai'i, served on the executive staffs of two Hawai'i governors and sat on the national steering committee of the Asian American and Pacific Islanders for Obama Leadership Council. Keith is a member of the Netroots Nation advisory board. Connect with him at http://equaljusticesociety.org, http://twitter.com/keithpr, http://facebook.com/civilrights and http://keithpr.com.

Joan is Senior Policy Editor at Daily Kos, where she's been blogging in various capacities since 2004. She writes on everything from healthcare and financial reform to the politics of the Mountain West from a home base in Idaho.

Pam Karlan is the Kenneth & Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School, where she also co-directs the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. The Clinic represents a wide variety of clients, including voters; workers raising claims under federal employment laws; criminal defendants; elected officials; and nonprofit organizations such as the California Medical Association, the National School Boards Association, and the National Women’s Law Center.

Karlan received her B.A., M.A., and J.D. from Yale. She clerked for Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court. From 1986 to 1988, she served as assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she specialized in voting rights and employment discrimination litigation. She remains a cooperating attorney with the Fund.

Karlan's primary scholarly interests lie in the areas of constitutional law and litigation, including voting rights, civil rights, and criminal procedure. She is the co-author of several leading casebooks, including Constitutional Law (6th ed. 2009) (with Stone, Seidman, Sunstein, and Tushnet); The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (3d ed. 2007) (with Issacharoff and Pildes) and Civil Rights Actions: Enforcing the Constitution (2d ed. 2007) (with Low, Jeffries, and Rutherglen). She is also the co-author of Keeping Faith With The Constitution (with Liu and Schroeder). Keeping Faith offers offers a poweful alternative to the shibboleths of “originalism” and “strict construction” propounded by conservatives. It argues for “constitutional fidelity” to the principles of liberty, equality, opportunity, democracy, and responsive government that were inscribed in the document and shows how those principles have been given meaning through an ongoing process of interpretation by both courts and the political process.

Karlan is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Early in her career, the American Lawyer named her one of its “Public Sector 45” – a group of lawyers “actively using their law degrees to change lives.”

Senator Ben Cardin was elected to serve the people of Maryland as Senator in 2006 after representing Baltimore in the Congress since 1987. Cardin serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where chairs the Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee and also serves on the Human Rights and the Law, Courts and Constitution Subcommittees. A leader on civil liberties and human rights, the environment and health care, fiscal issues and retirement security, Cardin also serves as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations, Budget and Small Business committees, and the Environment and Public Works Committee where he chairs the Water and Wildlife Subcommittee.

Follow Senator Cardin on twitter at @SenatorCardin