Board: Board of Advisors

Adam Winkler

Adam Winkler is a professor at UCLA School of Law, where he also serves as the school’s ACS faculty advisor and as a member of ACS’s Board of Academic Advisors. Winkler sits on the ACS Board of Advisors.

Winkler has published widely on American constitutional law and history, and his scholarship has been cited in landmark Supreme Court cases, including opinions on the Second Amendment and on corporate free speech rights. Winkler is the author of “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights” and “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” He was the co-editor of the “Encyclopedia of the American Constitution” (2d edition). Winkler’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books, Atlantic, New Republic, Slate, and Scotusblog.

Winkler received his J.D. from New York University School of Law, which honored him with the Legal Teaching Award for outstanding alumni in legal academia. He is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and holds a M.A. in political science from UCLA. He clerked for the late Hon. David Thompson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.                                                                                    

David A. Strauss

David A. Strauss is the Gerald Ratner Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and faculty director of the Jenner & Block Supreme Court and Appellate Clinic. His teaching interests include constitutional law, federal jurisdiction, administrative law, civil procedure and torts. In 2012, Strauss was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

Strauss has served as an assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, special counsel to the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. Senate, and an attorney-adviser in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. He has argued 19 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and has testified numerous times before Congress. He is co-editor of the “Supreme Court Review,” along with Geoffrey Stone, Justin Driver, and Dennis Hutchinson.

Strauss is the author of “The Living Constitution” (Oxford University Press, 2010) and many academic and popular articles. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Georgetown, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served as chair of the board of trustees of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, and as a member of the board of governors of the Chicago Council of Lawyers.

Strauss is a graduate magna cum laude of the Harvard Law School. He received a BPhil in politics from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude.

Paul M. Smith

Paul M. Smith is Vice President of Litigation and Strategy at the Campaign Legal Center, and teaches as a Distinguished Visitor from Practice at Georgetown University Law Center. In 2012, Smith was appointed to the ACS board of directors and served as board chair from 2006 to 2008.

Smith spent more than two decades as a partner at Jenner & Block, where he chaired its Appellate and U.S. Supreme Court Practice and co-chaired the its Election Law and Redistricting Practice. He has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court 21 times, including the landmark gay rights case Lawrence v. Texas and a series of important voting rights cases, and prepared amicus briefs in several key campaign finance cases McCutcheon v. FEC.

The National Law Journal named Smith one of the "Decade's Most Influential Lawyers.”   He has been frequently named to the DC Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, and 500 Leading Lawyers in America lists. His numerous awards include Legal Aid Society of DC’s Servant of Justice Award and the DC Bar’s Thurgood Marshall Award. He is a former co-chair of Lambda Legal.

Smith graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College, where he now sits on the board of trustees, and received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.

Dawn L. Smalls

Dawn L. Smalls is a partner at the law firm Jenner & Block, where she currently serves as the Monitor of a tier-one global financial institution. Smalls was previously a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, and before that served as Director of Democratic Participation for the Ford Foundation, where she oversaw approximately $40 million of grantmaking focused on democracy initiatives in the U.S. Previous foundation experience also includes serving as a Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations. In 2015, Smalls was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

During the Obama Administration, Smalls served as Executive Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. She also served during the Clinton Administration as Assistant to White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and as a Special Assistant in the Office of Management and Budget.

During the 2008 campaign, she served as the New York State Political Director for the Obama for America campaign and a Regional Political Director for the Hillary Clinton for President campaign.

Smalls also served as a commissioner on the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, the State agency tasked with ensuring that state elected officials and lobbyists comply with the State’s ethics and lobbying laws and regulations.

Smalls received a B.A. from Boston University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

 

Cliff Sloan

Cliff Sloan is currently a Dean's Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center. Sloan has litigated cases at all levels of federal and state courts, including multiple U.S. Supreme Court arguments. In 2015, Sloan was appointed to the ACS board of directors and served as board chair from 2015 to 2017.

Sloan has served in high-ranking positions in all three branches of the federal government, including as Associate Counsel to the President, Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure and Assistant to the Solicitor General. He also has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s Advisory Committee on Procedures.

Sloan has held major media jobs, including publisher of Slate magazine and general counsel of Washington Post Newsweek Interactive. He is co-author of “The Great Decision, Marbury v. Madison.”

Sloan also currently serves as chair of the board of the Public Welfare Foundation and on the boards of the Southern Center for Human Rights, the National Security Archive, and the Criminal Justice Advisory Panel of the Arc.

Sloan’s appellate work has been recognized by The National Law Journal, and he has received the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights, the Light of Justice Award from the Texas Defender Service, and the Catalyst Award for Legal Advocate of the Year from The Arc.

Sloan received a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and a B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard College. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Philippa Scarlett

Philippa Scarlett served as Deputy Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator and Senior Counselor for the Executive Office of the President during the Obama Administration. In that role, she developed and coordinated intellectual property enforcement policy across the federal government, including policy to support the creative and innovative industries such as the film, music, broadcasting, sports, publishing, tech, pharma, and fashion industries. In 2017, Scarlett was appointed to the ACS board of directors.

During her work with the Obama Administration, Scarlett also developed and coordinated policy to combat cyber-enabled trade secret theft, online commercial piracy, and the global trade in counterfeit products and related consumer protection and supply chain integrity challenges.

Before her service at the White House, Scarlett served as Deputy Associate Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice. As a member of DOJ's senior leadership team, her portfolio included management of policy as well as major civil and criminal enforcement matters of the Civil Rights Division; Antitrust Division; Access to Justice Office; and intellectual property matters from across the agency.

Previously, Scarlett was a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Her practice consisted of high-stakes litigation in trial and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, on a broad range of topics such as product liability, mass torts, constitutional law, antitrust and intellectual property. Her pro bono practice included litigating high-profile matters involving voting rights, affirmative action, and poverty law. She was featured by the National Law Journal as among the "Top Minority 40 Under 40 Attorneys" in the country for her work.

Scarlett clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court and for the Hon. Ann C. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Previously, she worked in DOJ’s Criminal Division, where she developed and managed U.S. rule of law and criminal justice assistance programs in Colombia, Ecuador, Rwanda, and South Africa.

She received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, her master's from Harvard University, and her law degree from Columbia Law School. She also studied at the Free University of Berlin, Germany as a German Academic Exchange Award (DAAD) recipient.