Past Winners

The Federalist Society is an organization of law students, lawyers and others interested in the law dedicated to advancing an understanding of the principles underlying American law and furthering their application. It was founded in 1982 by Spencer Abraham, Steven Calabresi, David McIntosh, and Lee Liberman Otis while they were law students at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago. Under the energetic, competent leadership of Eugene Meyer and Leonard Leo, the Society has since expanded into a nationally prominent institution representing more than 40,000 law students, attorneys, academics, public policy practitioners, and jurists.

With active chapters at each of the more than 200 ABA-accredited law schools and in 70 major cities across the nation, the Federalist Society organizes activities that foster appreciation for limited, constitutional government; property rights and markets; federalism; and the rule of law in protecting individual freedom. It believes it is the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.

The Federalist Society’s principal means of influence is balanced and rigorous debate. It, therefore, provides a forum for the strongest voices from opposing viewpoints to interact with its members. The Society also fosters serious legal scholarship, conducts educational programs, and offers opportunity for effective participation in the pubilc policy process.

The Honorable Spencer Abraham is Chairman and CEO of the Abraham Group, former U.S. Senator from Michigan, and Secretary of Energy under President George W. Bush.

Steven Calabresi is the George C. Dix Professor of Law at Northwestern University, Chairman of the Federalist Society’s Board of Directors, and served in the Reagan and first Bush Administrations.

The Honorable David McIntosh is a partner in the law firm Mayer Brown LLP, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and served in the Reagan and first Bush Administrations.

Ms. Lee Liberman Otis is Senior Vice President of the Federalist Society, director of its Faculty Division, and a former Associate Counsel to President George H.W. Bush.

Eugene Meyer has been with the Federalist Society since its inception as its Executive Director, CEO and President.

Leonard Leo is the Federalist Society’s Executive Vice President.

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Gary S. Becker received his BA degree from Princeton University, and has Masters and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Chicago. He taught at Columbia University for twelve years before returning to the University of Chicago in 1968. He has honorary degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Hitotsubashi University, University of Marselles, and many other universities. He is a University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago, and is Professor Graduate School of Business. He is also the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute

He won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, the National Medal of Science in 2000, the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1967, and numerous other awards. He is recognized for his expertise in human capital, economic incentives, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, and population. For almost 20 years he was a featured monthly columnist for Business Week Magazine. He and Judge Richard Posner have a blog at http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/, where every week they debate a different public policy issue.

He has written more than ten books and almost 100 professional articles. His books include Human Capital, The Economics of Discrimination, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, A Treatise on the Family, The Economics of Life (with Guity Nashat Becker), Social Economics (with Kevin Murphy), and Accounting for Tastes. His books have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and other languages.

He is a member of the Board of Faster Cures-dedicated to speeding up medical cures, the Advisory Committee on Financial Innovation of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the Hoover Task Force on Energy.

He has lectured to many groups of academics, business executives, and government officials. He is married to Guity Nashat Becker, a Professor of Middle East History, and they have four children.

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Alan Charles Kors teaches European intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair. He is Senior Fellow at both the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Goldwater Institute. Dr. Kors has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. He was editor-in-chief of the four volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment and served on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Dr. Kors has been elected four times by his colleagues to the University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility. He has received several awards for distinguished college teaching and served on the National Council for the Humanities from 1992 to 1998. In 2005, he was presented a National Humanities Medal for his contributions to scholarship in the humanities and his defense of freedom of expression and conscience on campus. In 2008, the American Conservative Union honored Dr. Kors with the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award.

Since the early 1980’s, Dr. Kors has been writing and lecturing widely on the absence of tolerance and intellectual diversity in academic life. His courageous defense of a student charged with racism in the infamous 1993 “water buffalo” case focused national attention on the limitations upon free speech in higher education. Dr. Kors is co-author of the 1998 landmark book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on American Campuses and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on whose board he continues to serve as Chairman Emeritus.

Dr. Kors received his B.A. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

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Robert L. Woodson, Sr. is founder and president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE). CNE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and demonstration organization that supports neighborhood-based initiatives to reduce crime and violence, restore families, create economic enterprise and employment, and revitalize low-income communities. The Center has provided training and technical assistance to more than 2000 leaders of faith-based and community organizations in 39 states. Since its inception in 1981, CNE has been on the forefront of a steadily growing movement to empower low-income Americans. Woodson is often referred to as the godfather of the neighborhood empowerment movement.

For more than three decades, Woodson has had a special concern for the problems of youth. In response to an epidemic of youth violence that has afflicted urban, rural and suburban neighborhoods alike, Woodson has focused much of CNE’s activities on an initiative to establish Violence-Free Zones in trouble spots throughout the nation. This Violence-Free Zone program has achieved significant results in reducing youth violence in Washington, DC; Dallas, TX; Milwaukee, WI; Baltimore, MD; Atlanta, GA, and Prince George’s County, MD.

A strong proponent of strategies of self-help and empowerment, Woodson is frequently featured as a social commentator in the print and on-air media, including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, Meet the Press and other national and local broadcasts. He received a B.S. from Cheyney University and a M.S.W. from the University of Pennsylvania.

He was appointed by Secretary Michael Chertoff to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and by President George W. Bush to the Fulbright Scholarship Commission; the Board of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA); and represented the United States on the five-member U.S. delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Conference on Tolerance and the Fight Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination.

Among the many awards he has received are the David R. Jones Award for Leadership in Voluntary Service, the Lenore and George W. Romney Citizen Volunteer Award, the Washington Times Foundation American Century Award; the Kahlil Gibran “Spirit of Humanity” Award; the Headway Magazine Booker T. Washington Award; the Martin Luther King, Jr. Family Life Institute “Real Dream” Award; the Outstanding Public Service Award from the Georgia Coalition of Black Women, Inc.; the George Washington Honor Medal presented by the Freedom Foundation at Valley Forge, and the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius” award. His publications include Youth Crime and Urban Policy, A View From the Inner City (1981), On the Road to Economic Freedom: An Agenda for Black Progress,(1987), A Summons to Life, Mediating Structures and the Prevention of Youth Crime,(1988), and The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods(1998).

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John Bolton is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. His research areas of interest include foreign policy and international organizations. From August 2005 to December 2006, Ambassador Bolton served with great distinction as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Steadfast in his defense of American interests, he represented this country with extraordinary principle, clarity, and patriotism.

From 2001 to 2005, Ambassador Bolton was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Prior to that, he had been Senior Vice President for Public Policy Research at the American Enterprise Institute since 1997. From 1989 to 1993, Ambassador Bolton was Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. During the last half of the 1980s, he served in the Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General in both the Civil Division and the Office of Legislative Affairs. From 1981 to 1983, Ambassador Bolton held the positions of General Counsel and Assistant Administrator for Program and Policy Coordination at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Ambassador Bolton’s exemplary public service also includes his membership from 1999 to 2001 on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to advise the President and Secretary of State on foreign policy issues related to religious freedom abroad. In 2006, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts documenting Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.

Ambassador Bolton is the author of numerous journal articles and monographs on foreign policy, national security matters, and Constitutional law. His work has appeared in the popular press and in scholarly publications. Currently, he is writing a book entitled Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the U.N. and Abroad. Ambassador Bolton holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

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Martin Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University. For more than 20 years, he has also been President and CEO of the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research. From 1982 through 1984, Dr. Feldstein was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and President Reagan’s chief economic advisor. He served as President of the American Economic Association for the year 2004.

In 2006, President Bush appointed Dr. Feldstein as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Dr. Feldstein has received honorary doctorates from several universities and is an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1977, he was presented the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, a prize awarded every two years to an economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to economic science.

Dr. Feldstein is internationally recognized for his contributions to economic thought. For the past quarter century, he has been an authoritative voice in the intellectual defense of free markets. A central insight of Dr. Feldstein’s scholarship is that individuals respond in predictable ways to economic incentives. That lesson has stimulated his innovative research on tax policy, Social Security, health economics, and international finance. It also informs his current inquiries into the economics of terrorism and national security.

An influential teacher, Dr. Feldstein has inspired a generation of young economists who have themselves shaped and defined government policy supportive of economic growth and prosperity. He is the author of more than 300 research articles in professional journals and the business press. Dr. Feldstein is also a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University

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Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University. Abigail is vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Both are also Senior Fellows at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The Thernstroms are coauthors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning for which they were awarded the 2007 Fordham Foundation prize “for distinguished scholarship.”

They previously co-authored America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, praised as a “masterwork” by Hoover Institution Research Fellow Shelby Steele. The Thernstroms are also the editors of Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity. Currently, they are writing a book tentatively titled Don’t Call It Segregation: The Myth of American Apartheid.

Abigail also serves on the board of advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She was a member of the Massachusetts state Board of Education for more than a decade until her third term ended in November 2006. Since publication in 1987 of her award-winning Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, Abigail has been a leader in the movement to restore and uphold equal protection of the law irrespective of group identity. She is currently completing the book Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. A scholar of American social history, Stephan has contributed to the body of knowledge on liberty and opportunity in the American political and social order. Stephan is the award-winning author of several books on American history and has written widely in opinion journals for general audiences. In 2002, President Bush appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Both independently and collaboratively, the Thernstroms have advanced the principles of equal citizenship, equality of opportunity, and civic responsibility. Theirs has been a much-needed voice of reason in American discourse.

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James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. From 1961 to 1987, he was the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University and from 1985 to 1997 the James Collins Professor of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the nation’s most influential social scientists and public intellectuals, Professor Wilson is the author or co-author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture has Weakened Families. Others include The Moral Sense, Moral Judgement, Bureaucracy, and Thinking about Crime. His textbook American Government is more widely used on university campuses than any other book on the subject. Professor Wilson has also edited or contributed to books on urban problems, government regulation of business, and the prevention of delinquency among children. Many of his writings on morality and human character have been collected in On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson.

In 1990, Professor Wilson received the James Madison Award from the American Political Science Association for a career of distinguished scholarship. In 1994, he received the John Gaus Award for “exemplary scholarship in the fields of political science and public administration.” In 2003, President George W. Bush presented Professor Wilson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Professor Wilson has served on a number of national and presidential commissions on crime, drug abuse prevention, foreign intelligence, and bioethics. For more than twenty years, he has chaired the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Professor Wilson received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He holds honorary degrees from seven universities, including Harvard.

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Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was a faculty member of Princeton University’s Department of Politics and a fellow at Princeton’s Center of International Studies and a research fellow at the Lehrman Institute. Born in Arnoun in the south of Lebanon, Ajami is one of the mostinfluential Arab-American intellectuals of his generation. He has been an ardent and outspoken proponent of democracy in the Middle East. “The spectacle of ordinary Iraqis, old women, old men, Iraqis returning from far away to vote, people holding up their forefingers dipped in purple ink,” Ajami said in an interview after the first round of Iraqi elections last year, “gave the lie to the idea that democracy is alien or need be alien to this region.”

A prolific and elegant writer, Ajami is the author of numerous books, including Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey and The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967. His most-recent book is this year’s The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq.

Fluent in Arabic, Ajami is also contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report, a consultant on Middle Eastern affairs for CBS News, and a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs and the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, as well. Ajami earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington.