Populism and Political Economy: Looking Ahead to 2021

Eileen Appelbaum

Eileen Appelbaum is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, Fellow at Rutgers University Center for Women and Work, and Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. Prior to joining CEPR, she held positions as Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University and as Professor of Economics at Temple University. She holds a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Appelbaum’s research focuses on organizational restructuring and outcomes for firms and workers; private equity and financialization; and work-family policies. Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street, coauthored with Rosemary Batt, was selected by the Academy of Management as one of the four best books of 2014 and 2015, and was a finalist for the 2016 George R. Terry award. Unfinished Business, Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy, coauthored with Ruth Milkman, examines the effects of paid family leave in California on employers and employees. It has been widely cited in discussions of national paid family and medical leave policy. Her current research examines the implications of consolidation of hospitals and decentralization of health services to outpatient care centers for the jobs of non-professional employees in these two segments of the healthcare industry.

Several of Dr. Appelbaum’s earlier books – The New American Workplace: Transforming Work Systems in the US with Rosemary Batt, Low Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace with Annette Bernhardt and Richard Murnane, and Manufacturing Advantage: Why Higher Performance Work Systems Pay Off with Peter Berg, Thomas Bailey and Arne Kalleberg – were selected by Princeton University for its distinguished list of Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics.

She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, including “Domestic Outsourcing, Rent Seeking, and Increasing Inequality,” RRPE, 2017: 1-16 and “Implications of Financial Capitalism for Employment Relations Research: Evidence from Breach of Trust and Implicit Contracts in Private Equity Buyouts,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 51(3): 498–518, 2013.

Kathryn Ardizzone

Kathryn Ardizzone is Counsel with Knowledge Ecology International.

Her background is in public interest and civil rights law. Kathryn joined KEI in June 2019 after working for Essential Information, a nonprofit organization founded by Ralph Nader that supports a variety of projects to encourage citizens to become active and engaged in their communities. She has also served as an associate attorney at a boutique labor and employment law firm and spent three years as law clerk to Judge Michael Rankin at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

During law school, Kathryn served as a judicial intern with the District of Columbia Commission on Human Rights, a research assistant with Georgetown’s Street Law Clinic, and interned with the Erlich Law Office, a boutique labor and employment law firm, the ACLU of Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia Public Defender Service, and the Children’s Defense Fund. 

Kathryn holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Raúl Carillo

Raúl Carrillo is Policy Counsel at the Demand Progress Education Fund and a Fellow at the Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, where he is helping to develop a regulatory response to the Facebook Libra Project and similar efforts. Previously, he was a Staff Attorney at the New Economy Project and Special Counsel to the Enforcement Director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Lydia DePillis

Lydia DePillis is a reporter at ProPublica covering trade and economic policy in the Trump administration. Previously, she served as an economy reporter at CNN Business and at the Houston Chronicle, a business reporter at the Washington Post, a technology writer at The New Republic, and a real estate columnist at the Washington City Paper, where she authored its award-winning Housing Complex blog.

Lydia is from Seattle, Washington and attended Columbia College in New York City, where she spent most of her time blogging. Her work has also appeared in the New York Observer, Pacific Standard, Slate, and various trade publications, and she has appeared on a wide variety of radio and television stations.

Mya Frazier

As a fellow with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, Frazier is investigating the expanding infrastructure of Silicon Valley within Middle America. A business and investigative journalist based in the Midwest, she is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek and a former staff writer at The Cleveland Plain Dealer and American City Business Journalism.. Her work has also appeared in Outside, Columbia Journalism Review, NewYorker.com, The New Republic, Slate, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. She is currently at work on a book about the origins of regional inequality and the future of the company town.

Gregg Gelzinis

Gregg Gelzinis is a senior policy analyst for Economic Policy at American Progress. Gelzinis focuses primarily on financial institutions, financial markets, and consumer finance policy. His analysis has been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Before joining American Progress in 2016, Gelzinis completed a graduate school fellowship at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Office of Financial Institutions. During his undergraduate career, he held internships at Swiss Re, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, and in the office of Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI). Gelzinis graduated summa cum laude from Georgetown University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in government and a master’s degree in American government, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. He is a Massachusetts native and a die-hard Boston sports fan.

Andy Green

Andy Green is the managing director of Economic Policy at American Progress. He writes and speaks about financial markets and regulation; corporate governance and competition; international trade; and the economy and middle class. Green was editor of “Raising Wages and Rebuilding Wealth: A Roadmap for Middle-Class Economic Security,” a wide-ranging CAP report on causes and solutions to the wages and wealth squeeze on middle-class America. He writes regularly on financial regulation, including the Volcker rule, and has co-authored prominent CAP reports on the relationship between corporate long-termism and workforce training and on how to revitalize competition policy. He has appeared on CNN, Fox Business News, Bloomberg TV, C-SPAN, and a range of radio talk shows, and he has testified before Congress.

Prior to joining American Progress, he served as counsel to Kara Stein, commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Prior to joining the SEC in 2014, Green served as counsel to U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and staff director of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Economic Policy. He participated in the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 and was the lead staff member for the Merkley-Levin amendment, which added the Volcker rule into the law. He also participated in the passage of the JOBS Act as the lead staff member of the Merkley-Brown-Bennet amendment, which authored the law’s crowdfunding provisions.

Prior to joining Sen. Merkley’s office in early 2009, Green practiced corporate law at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Green holds a B.A. in government and an M.A. in East Asian regional studies from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Green also serves as a member of the board of directors of the Junior State of America Foundation, which supports nonpartisan year-round and summer leadership programs for high school students who are interested in politics and government.

Lisa Heinzerling

Lisa Heinzerling is the Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. Her specialties include administrative law, environmental law, food law, and torts. She has published several books, including a leading casebook (with Zygmunt Plater and others) on environmental law, a then-novel casebook (with Mark Tushnet) aimed at introducing first-year law students to the regulatory and administrative state, and a widely cited critique of the use of cost-benefit analysis in environmental policy (Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, co-authored with Frank Ackerman). Peer environmental law professors have four times voted her work among the top ten articles of the year.

Professor Heinzerling has received the faculty teaching award at Georgetown Law and numerous awards related to her scholarship and advocacy in environmental law. She is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and the chair of the board of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

After finishing law school, where she served as editor-in-chief of the University of Chicago Law Review, Professor Heinzerling clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a Skadden Fellow at Business & Professional People for the Public Interest, in Chicago, and for three years practiced environmental law in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office.

While at Georgetown, Professor Heinzerling has continued to litigate cases in environmental law. Most prominently, she served as lead author of the winning briefs in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the Supreme Court held that the Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases. A survey of over 400 environmental lawyers and law professors ranked this case as the most significant case in all of environmental law.

From January 2009 to July 2009, Heinzerling served as Senior Climate Policy Counsel to the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and then, from July 2009 to December 2010, she served as Associate Administrator of EPA’s Office of Policy.  In 2008, she served as a member of President Obama’s EPA transition team.

Sally Hubbard

Sally Hubbard is Director of Enforcement Strategy at Open Markets Institute. She possesses expertise on critical sectors, especially technology platforms like Google and Facebook, and engages with state attorneys general, who have significant authority to police and rein in monopoly power.

Sally served as an Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Bureau of New York State, working for Attorneys General Spitzer, Cuomo, and Schneiderman. Most recently, she worked at the Capitol Forum as an investigative reporter and antitrust analyst with a focus on technology platforms.

In the antitrust bureau, she investigated violations of state and federal antitrust laws from local mergers to nationwide multi-state price-fixing. Sally was honored with the Louis Leftkowitz Award for her efforts in investigating municipal bond derivative bid-rigging.

She is a Washington Bytes contributor for Forbes.com and has written for The New York Times and CNN, among other outlets.

Sally holds a Bachelor of Arts from The College of William and Mary and a law degree from New York University School of Law.

Reed Hundt

Reed Hundt was a member of the transition teams for the Clinton and Obama presidencies. He was the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in 1993-97. He has taught at Yale College, Law School and School of Management, practiced law in California and Washington, D.C., started for-profit and non-profit firms (including Coalition for Green Capital and Making Every Vote Count), served as a board member for numerous technology and communications firms, and raised a family with his wife Betsy in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He is the author of You Say You Want a Revolution, In China’s Shadow, The Politics of Abundance, and Zero Hour.

Alex Jacquez

Alex Jacquez serves as a Senior Policy Advisor on the Bernie 2020 campaign. Prior to joining the campaign, he was a Policy Advisor for the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Committee (DPCC) under Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and DPCC Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). He served in the Obama Administration as Associate Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House, Legislative Analyst in the Office of External and Intergovernmental Affairs at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and as Confidential Assistant in the Office of Secretary Tom Vilsack at USDA. He graduated from Lehigh University where he lettered in baseball and majored in political science. Alex was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Vienna, Virginia.

Linda Jun

Linda Jun is Senior Policy Counsel at Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (AFREF), a national coalition formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that is working to lay the foundation for a strong, stable, and ethical financial system. In collaboration with coalition partners, she leads AFREF’s policy work on consumer and housing issues. Before joining AFREF, she was Senior Staff Attorney in the Foreclosure Prevention Project at Mobilization for Justice (formerly MFY Legal Services) in New York City, where she represented homeowners in all stages of foreclosure proceedings, including administrative complaints, pleadings, settlement conference negotiations, motion practice, discovery, and affirmative litigation in state and federal court. She has presented at several local, state, and national trainings on a wide range of foreclosure related issues to attorneys, housing counselors, and court personnel. In 2016, she was one of four primary authors of the NYRL report Divergent Paths: The Need for More Uniform Standards and Practices in New York State’s Residential Foreclosure Conference Process. Before her work at Mobilization for Justice, Ms. Jun spent two years starting a new court-based foreclosure mediation program in the Third Judicial Circuit in Illinois, creating the program’s infrastructure and drafting the local court rule for the program. Ms. Jun graduated cum laude from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and received her B.A. from Northwestern University.

Alex Lawson

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition— a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans. Lawson previously served as the Communications Director for the organization. In his current role, he coordinates the multifaceted education and advocacy operations to protect and improve the economic security of disadvantaged and at-risk populations while maintaining Social Security as a vehicle of social justice.

Lawson is also the owner of We Act Radio and its video and livestream production arm NMG Live. We Act is a media corporation that combines broadcast and new media to deliver shows in the formats people use most. We Act’s original programs can be found streaming at WeActRadio.com; on AM and FM radio stations around the country; on podcast or iTunes; and live-streaming on We Act’s YouTube channel.

Thea Lee

Thea Lee joined EPI as incoming president November 1, 2017, and became president January 1, 2018. Lee has a longstanding relationship with EPI, having begun her career here as an international trade economist in the 1990s.

Lee is committed to EPI’s mission of building an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. To ensure that policymakers and advocates have the tools they need to fight and win key battles on behalf of working people, Lee is extending EPI’s reach through expanded engagement with the states and with progressive organizers.

Lee came to EPI from the AFL-CIO, a voluntary federation of 56 national and international labor unions that represent 12.5 million working men and women, where she served as deputy chief of staff. At the AFL-CIO, she built a long track record of conducting rigorous economic research, overseeing an ambitious policy agenda, and helping steer a large organization through change. Lee joined the AFL-CIO in 1997 as chief international economist, then assumed the role of policy director before becoming deputy chief of staff.

Lee has spent her career advocating on behalf of working families in national policy debates on issues such as wage inequality, workers’ rights, and fair trade. She is co-author of The Field Guide to the Global Economy, published by The New Press, and has authored numerous publications on the North American Free Trade Agreement, the impact of international trade on U.S. wage inequality, and the domestic steel and textile industries.

Lee has been a voice for workers in testimony before congressional committees and in television and radio appearances—including on PBS News Hour, Good Morning America, NPR’s All Things Considered and Marketplace, Fox Business, and the PBS documentary Commanding Heights. She has also served on the State Department Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy, the Export-Import Bank Advisory Committee, and the Board of Directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research, among others.

Lee holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Smith College. Lee lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and dog. She has one daughter, who teaches middle school in Brooklyn. She likes to cook, read, and travel.

Phil Longman

Phillip Longman  is managing editor and policy director at Open Markets Institute.  He is also a senior editor of  Washington Monthly  and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches public policy writing and health care policy.

His work has appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The New York Times Magazine, Politica Exterior, Der Spiegel, and World Politics Review.

His speaking engagements have included addresses and consultations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Naval War College, the Japan Foundation, and the governments of India and the Russian Federation, the Wharton School of Business, Yale School of Management, and the National Convention of the American Legion.

Joe Maxwell

Joe Maxwell is the President of Family Farm Action. He focuses his work on Family Farm Action’s vision of an inclusive U.S. economy that works for all people, providing them with the prosperity they help build and not for just a handful of individuals and multi-national corporations. 

Over the last two years, Joe has co-authored six policy briefing papers focusing on the abusive power monopolies have over our food and agriculture sectors. Joe has advised several Presidential, U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representative candidates on their antitrust and agriculture and food policies.

Joe holds an Agriculture Economics Degree and Law Degree from the University of Missouri. He has been a staff member on numerous political campaigns, served as a Missouri state legislator and as Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor. He recently was the Executive Director of the Organization for Competitive Markets. 

Joe and his brother, Steve, are Missouri family farmers.

Amit Narang

Amit Narang is an expert on issues related to the federal regulatory process. He served as articles editor of The Administrative Law Review, a widely circulated legal journal focused on regulatory law and policy. He obtained his J.D. from American University-Washington College of Law and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Helaine Olen

Helaine Olen is an Opinion Writer for the Washington Post Opinions section. She’s the author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry and co-author of The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be Complicated. She’s been featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and took part in Frontline’s Emmy award winning The Retirement Gamble. An expert on money and society, she writes on issues including the economy, politics, healthcare, retirement, Social Security, student loans and women’s issues. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, AARP and Slate. She’s a frequent public speaker, moderator of political and financial panels, regular commentator on podcasts and radio shows and serves on the advisory board of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Sanjukta Paul

Sanjukta Paul joined Wayne Law as an assistant professor of law in fall 2017. Her current work lies at the intersection of antitrust and labor regulation, and she teaches in these areas as well as in corporations. More broadly, she is interested in labor, market and business regulation and in “law and economics” from a critical and reform perspective. She is also a fellow of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale.

Paul’s current book project, Solidarity in the Shadow of Antitrust (Cambridge University Press), reinterprets the development of antitrust law in terms of its allocation of economic coordination rights, with a particular focus on work and workers. Her scholarship has also appeared or will appear in, among others, the UCLA Law Review, Law & Contemporary Problems, and the Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law. Her paper “The Enduring Ambiguities of Antitrust Liability for Worker Collective Action” was recognized with the Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund’s award for the best antitrust scholarship of 2016 (category prize).

Paul also regularly writes for broader audiences, with recent or current pieces in The American Prospect, Aeon, and The Nation, as well as blogs such as OnLabor and the Law & Political Economy blog. She and her work are frequently cited in the press, recently including The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. She is closely engaged with policy applications of her work in the judicial, administrative, and legislative spheres. For example, she has presented her research at the Department of Justice – Antitrust Division and in testimony in front of the House Antitrust Subcommittee; prepared comments in various proceedings of the Federal Trade Commission; and prepared an amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit in City of Seattle v. Chamber of Commerce.

Paul was previously a research and teaching fellow at UCLA School of Law, and prior to that, a public interest attorney in Los Angeles focusing on labor and civil rights issues. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School and completed a judicial clerkship on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Graham Steele

Graham Steele is the director of the Corporations and Society Initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford GSB, Graham was a member of the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

From 2015 to 2017, Graham was the Minority Chief Counsel for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs. From 2010 to 2015 he was a Legislative Assistant for United States Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), handling the Senator’s work as a member of the Senate Banking Committee. He also spent four years as the staff director of the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions & Consumer Protection. Prior to joining Senator Brown’s staff, Graham was a policy counsel at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch in Washington, D.C.

Graham received his bachelors degree in political science from the University of Rochester and his law degree from The George Washington University Law School. He is a member of the Massachusetts State Bar. He is originally from Brookline, Massachusetts.

Marshall Steinbaum

Marshall Steinbaum is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah. He studies market power in labor markets and its policy implications, including for antitrust and competition policy. His work has appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Law and Contemporary Problems. He is also an editor of After Piketty: the Agenda for Economics and Inequality, which was published in 2017. He earned a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2014.

Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is the author of Goliath: The 100-year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Previously, he was a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute, and prior to that, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the US House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon. He lives in Washington, DC. Goliath is his first book.

Jennifer Taub

Jennifer Taub is the author of financial crisis book Other People’s Houses published in 2014 by Yale Press. She is also the co-author with the late Kathleen Brickey of Corporate and White Collar Crime: Cases and Materials, 6th edition, published in 2017 by Wolters Kluwer. Formerly an Associate General Counsel at Fidelity Investments, Taub’s research and writing focuses on corporate governance and financial market regulation. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Yale College and a professor of law. She teaches courses in Contracts, Corporations, Securities Regulation, and White Collar Crime.

Taub has written extensively on financial reform and corporate governance. She has testified as an expert before the United States Senate Banking Committee and a United States House Financial Services Subcommittee concerning banking and financial reform related matters. Her speaking engagements at conferences, colloquia, and lectures in the U.S. and overseas include events sponsored or hosted by the following: The Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware (2016); Columbia Law School (2016); The Office of Financial Research (2016); Loyola University Chicago, Institute for Investor Protection (2015); Yale Law School’s Mortgage Foreclosure Litigation Clinic (2015); University of Illinois, College of Law (2014); Harvard Law School (2014);  Washington University School of Law (2014); The Harvard Kennedy School Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government (2014); Americans for Financial Reform and the AFL-CIO (2014); The University of St. Thomas (2014); Better Markets and George Washington University Law School, Center for Law, Economics & Finance (2013); The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Centre for Financial Regulation and Economic Development (2013); The AFL-CIO, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, and Macroeconomic Policy Institute (2013); The Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College (2012); The North American Securities Administrators Association (2012); Corporate Law Center at the University of Cincinnati Law School (2012); Boston College Law School (2012); National Association for Business Economics (2011); The Roosevelt Institute (2010); Fordham Law School (2010), University at Buffalo Law School (2010); The Political Economy Workshop, UMass Amherst (2010); and The Elfenworks Center for Fiduciary Capitalism at St. Mary’s College (2009).

In addition to the book, Other People’s Houses, Taub has written extensively on the financial crisis. Her publications include “The Sophisticated Investor and the Global Financial Crisis” in Corporate Governance Failures: The Role of Institutional Investors in the Global Financial Crisis (UPenn Press, 2011) and a case study on American International Group in Robert A. G. Monks and Nell Minow’s fifth edition of Corporate Governance (Wiley, 2011). Additional works include a chapter titled “Delay, Dilutions, and Delusions: Implementing the Dodd-Frank Act” in Restoring Shared Prosperity (2013) and a chapter titled “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Banking,” in the Handbook on the Political Economy of the Financial Crisis (Oxford, 2012). She wrote entries on “Shadow Banking” and “Financial Deregulation” for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor and Economic History (Oxford, 2013) and the chapter “Great Expectations for the Office of Financial Research,” in Will it Work? How Will We Know? The Future of Financial Reform (2010). In addition, she has published Reforming the Banks for Good in Dissent (2014). Her article, “The Subprime Specter Returns: High Finance and the Growth of High-Risk Consumer Debt,” was published in the New Labor Forum (2015). And, she recently wrote a book chapter on “New Hopes and Hazards for Social Investment Crowdfunding” in Law and Policy for a New Economy (Edward Elgar, 2017).

Her corporate governance work often focuses on the role of institutional investors, including mutual funds. Her article “Able but Not Willing: The Failure of Mutual Fund Advisers to Advocate for Shareholders’ Rights,” published in the Journal of Corporation Law (2009) was initially presented at a conference jointly sponsored by the Yale School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and the Oxford Said Business School. Her article titled “Managers in the Middle: Seeing and Sanctioning Corporate Political Spending after Citizens United” was presented at the New York University Law School, Brennan Center for Justice and later published in the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy (2012). Taub’s article, “Is Hobby Lobby a Tool for Limiting Corporate Constitutional Rights,” was presented at Harvard Law School and later published in a symposium issue of Constitutional Commentary in 2015 on “Money, Politics, Corporations, and the Constitution” (2015).

Taub has also recently ventured into the area of legal education and pedagogy. This includes her article “Unpopular Contracts and Why They Matter: Burying Langdell and Enlivening Students,” published in the Washington Law Review (2013). She is also the co-author with Martha McCluskey and Frank Pasquale of “Law and Economics: Contemporary Approaches,” published in Yale Law & Policy Review (2016). In addition to scholarly work, Professor Taub has written pieces for a variety of blogs including the New York Times Dealbook, The Baseline Scenario, Race to the Bottom, Pareto Commons, The Conglomerate, and Concurring Opinions. She has appeared as an expert commentator on CNN and MSNBC and has been interviewed by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal/ MarketWatch, Money, CBSNews.com, Marketplace Radio, Bloomberg, New England Public Radio, Vermont Public Radio, the BBC, the Guardian, and other international, national and regional media outlets.

She served as chair of the Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services for the 2017 AALS annual meeting. She is a member of the Free Speech for People Legal Advisory Committee and volunteers with Americans for Financial Reform and is also on the board of nonprofit organizations Free Speech for People and the Society of Investment Law.

Nikki Usher

Nikki Usher, Ph.D. is an associate professor at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the College of Media's Journalism Department (with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Communication).  Her research focuses on news production in the changing digital environment, blending insights from media sociology and political communication. From 2019-2020, she is a fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Her first book, Making News at The New York Times (University of Michigan Press, 2014) was the first book-length study of the US’s foremost newspaper in the Internet era and won the Tankard Award, a national book award from the Association for Education and Mass Communication in Journalism. Her second book, Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (University of Illinois Press, 2016), focused on the rise of programming and data journalism, and was a finalist for the Tankard Award, making Dr. Usher the first solo author to be a two-time finalist. Prior to Illinois, she was an associate professor at George Washington University.

Sandeep Vaheesan

Sandeep Vaheesan is legal director at the Open Markets Institute. Vaheesan previously served as a regulations counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he helped develop and draft the first comprehensive federal rule on payday, vehicle title, and high-cost installment loans. Vaheesan has published articles and essays on a variety of topics in antitrust law, including the relationship between antitrust and workers and the political content of antitrust. His writing has appeared in the Berkeley Business Law Journal, Harvard Law & Policy Review, Nebraska Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, and Yale Law Journal Forum. He received a B.A. from the University of Maryland and a J.D. and M.A. from Duke University.

Lori Wallach

Lori Wallach is the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. A 25-year veteran of congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fight over NAFTA, she was named to the “Politico’s 50” list of thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016 for her leadership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership debate. Wallach is an internationally recognized expert on trade with experience advocating in Congress and foreign parliaments, trade negotiations, courts, government agencies, the media and in the streets. Dubbed “the Trade Debate’s Guerrilla Warrior” in a National Journal profile and “Ralph Nader with a sense of humor” in a Wall Street Journal profile, she combines a lawyer’s expertise on the terms and outcomes of agreements with insight from the front lines of trade debates. Wallach’s specialty is translating arcane trade issues into accessible language.

Wallach has testified on NAFTA, WTO, and other globalization issues before 30 congressional committees and appeared as a trade commentator on MSNBC, Fox, CNN, ABC, Bloomberg, PBS, NPR and numerous foreign outlets. She has been published and quoted in The New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, The Washington Post, USA Today, the Financial Times, and more. A lawyer who has worked in television news and on political campaigns, Wallach is well-informed about the role trade issues played in the 2016 election and the implications for the Trump presidency and 2018 congressional elections as the voters demand action on trade.

Books she has written on trade include The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority (2013) and Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO (2004) and she has contributed to numerous anthologies. She was recently one of three panelists, alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel, at the C-20 Summit titled “Civil 20 Dialogue with the G20 Presidency” which addressed the most pressing globalization challenges of the 2017 G20 Summit.

Wallach was a founder of the Citizens Trade Campaign, a U.S. national coalition of consumer, labor, environmental, family farm, religious, and civil rights groups representing over 11 million Americans, and serves on its board. Wallach is a graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Law School.

Murshed Zaheed

Murshed Zaheed is one of the top hybrid legislative, policy, and digital strategists in American politics. Prior to leading Megaphone, he served as the Political Director of CREDO Mobile – a social change-oriented corporation renowned for being a progressive powerhouse of activism and philanthropy.

Murshed’s years of experience as a senior leadership aide in Congress include his position as Director of New Media for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He has worked and consulted for top nonprofit organizations, corporations, and national campaigns creating winning multi-channel grassroots advocacy campaigns and communications programs. He was also a member of Gov. Howard Dean’s groundbreaking digital team during his 2003–2004 presidential campaign. Murshed has a B.A. in political science from UCLA and a J.D. from Boston University School of Law. He is a member of the bars in Washington D.C. and in Massachusetts.