The 2026 Regent Law Review Symposium occurred on Friday, September 25.

Click here to watch the sessions.

Speaker Biographies

PANEL 1

LOOKING INWARD: THE EXECUTIVE HOMELAND SECURITY, AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Judge Chris Wolfe (Moderator)

Judge Chris Wolfe serves as a United States District Judge in the Western District of Texas—Waco Division. He was appointed by President Trump in April 2026. Prior to his appointment, Judge Wolfe served as an Assistant United States Attorney for 15 years in the Northern District of Texas until he was appointed as a state district judge by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in 2018. Judge Wolfe received his undergraduate degree from Baylor University and his law degree from Baylor Law School.

Liza Goitein

Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein is Senior Director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program, which seeks to advance effective national security policies that respect constitutional values and the rule of law. Goitein is a nationally-recognized expert on presidential emergency powers, government surveillance, and government secrecy.

Her writing has been featured in major newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Magazine, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs, and she has testified before Congress on several occasions. Goitein previously served as counsel to Senator Russ Feingold, chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and as a trial attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. She graduated from the Yale Law School and clerked for the Honorable Michael Daly Hawkins on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Steven Engel

In a career spanning both private and public practice, Steven A. Engel is a leading litigator and counselor, acting as an advocate in high-profile trial and appellate matters and advising clients on their most sensitive and complex legal issues. Until January 2021, Mr. Engel served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. As the head of the office, Mr. Engel served as the chief counsel to the Attorney General and the principal legal adviser to the Executive Branch, providing legal advice to the President and cabinet secretaries on the most critical constitutional and statutory questions, including matters pertaining to national security, administrative law, criminal law, congressional oversight, and executive orders.

Before his appointment as Assistant Attorney General in 2017, Mr. Engel had been a partner at Dechert since 2009 and previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Engel clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Judge Alex Kozinski.

Ben Wittes

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. He co-founded and is the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, which is devoted to sober and serious discussion of “Hard National Security Choices.” He is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and a law analyst at NBC News and MSNBC. Wittes and Susan Hennessey are coauthors of “Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office.” He has written extensively on the judicial system and executive power. Between 1997 and 2006, Wittes served as an editorial writer for the Washington Post specializing in legal affairs. Before joining the editorial page staff of the Post, Wittes covered the Justice Department and federal regulatory agencies as a reporter and news editor at Legal Times. His writing has also appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines over the years.

PANEL 2

LOOKING OUTWARD: THE EXECUTIVE AND WAR POWERS

Attorney General John Ashcroft (Moderator)

As the 79th Attorney General of the United States, he led the Department of Justice in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, reorganizing the world’s largest law enforcement agency, championing the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, and dismantling terrorist cells across the country. His leadership during that transformative period helped disrupt terrorist plots worldwide, and under his watch the Department of Justice earned a clean audit for the first time in its history.

Ashcroft’s career of public service to Missouri began as a professor at what is now Missouri State University. After losing a congressional race, he became Missouri’s 46th State Auditor. He was then elected to two terms as Missouri Attorney General, and two terms as Governor of Missouri. In 1994, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He served on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees, among others, and helped balance the federal budget for the first time in decades. Since leaving government, Ashcroft has provided confidential strategic consulting and crisis counseling to major international corporations and has served as a Distinguished Professor of Law and Government at Regent University.

He is a great friend to Regent, and we are grateful to have both his expertise and knowledge as well as his care and affection. 

Elliot Gaiser

T. Elliot Gaiser is the Office of Legal Counsel’s 27th Assistant Attorney General. He was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2025. 

Prior to joining the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Gaiser served as the 11th Solicitor General of Ohio. In that role, he represented his home state and its agencies before the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the Supreme Court of Ohio, and other state and federal courts.  

Mr. Gaiser clerked for Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Neomi Rao of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Edith H. Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In the private sector, Mr. Gaiser worked at the law firms Jones Day, Boyden Gray, and Gibson Dunn. He is also a husband and father. 

Katherine Ebright

Katherine Yon Ebright is senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, where she focuses on war powers and the constitutional separation of powers.  Ebright’s work has been published in outlets including the Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Lawfare, and Just Security, and her commentary has appeared in Foreign Policy, the New York Times, Vox, and elsewhere.  She received an AB in social studies from Harvard College and a JD from Columbia Law School.  Before joining the Brennan Center, she worked at the Public International Law & Policy Group and served as a law clerk to Judges John M. Walker Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and J. Paul Oetken of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Montgomery Kosma

Monty Kosma is Founder and CEO of Chironic AI. He is also a partner at The Breeze Law Firm and Chairman of the Board of the R Street Institute.

Kosma co-founded The Green Bag, where his research on President Thomas Jefferson and the First Barbary War challenged the conventional account of Jefferson’s understanding and exercise of presidential war powers. That work informed David P. Currie’s treatment of the episode in The Constitution in Congress: The Jeffersonians, which the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel later cited in its 2018 opinion on the Syria chemical-weapons strikes. 

Kosma holds a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. He clerked for Judge David B. Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, practiced at Gibson Dunn - where he worked with Ted Olson on Bush v. Gore - and at Jones Day, then joined McKinsey & Company’s media practice and served as COO of Fandor, Netflix’s first streaming movie competitor.

KEYNOTE REMARKS

John Malcolm

John Malcolm oversees Advancing American Freedom’s work to increase understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law as Vice President of the organization’s Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law.

Prior to joining Advancing American Freedom in 2025, Malcolm was the Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and the Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Malcolm served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division from 2001 to 2004, where he oversaw sections on computer crime and intellectual property, domestic security, child exploitation and obscenity, and special investigations.

Immediately prior to that, he was a founding partner in the Atlanta law firm of Malcolm & Schroeder, LLP. From 1990 to 1997, Malcolm was an assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, assigned to the fraud and public corruption section, and also an associate independent counsel, investigating fraud and abuse in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia College, Malcolm began his career as a law clerk to a federal district court judge and a federal appellate court judge as well, and as an associate at Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan (new Eversheds Sutherland). Malcolm serves on the Board of Trustees of the Washington National Opera and is a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation, the largest funder of civil legal aid in the United States.