Past Winners

Michael Barone is the Senior Political Analyst for The Washington Examiner and Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He is also a syndicated columnist and commentator on U. S. elections and political trends for the Fox News Channel.

Mr. Barone served as law clerk to Judge Wade H. McCree, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit from 1969 to 1971. From 1974 to 1981, he was Vice President of the polling firm Peter D. Hart Research Associates. From 1982 to 1988, Mr. Barone was a member of the editorial page staff of The Washington Post. From 1989 to 1996 and again from 1998 to 2009, he was a Senior Writer for U.S. News and World Report. From 1996 to 1998, Mr. Barone was a Senior Staff Editor at Reader’s Digest.

A leading authority on contemporary American politics, Mr. Barone is the principal co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, published by National Journal every two years and now in its 20th edition. He is also the author of Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (1990), The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again (2001), and Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Competition for the Nation’s Future (2004). Mr. Barone’s most recent book is Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers (2007).

As a political journalist and historian, Mr. Barone gives distinctive depth to reporting on American politics. Over the years, he has written for many publications, including the Economist, New York Times, Weekly Standard, National Review, New Republic, American Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, Daily Telegraph, and Sunday Times.

Mr. Barone is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School and was an editor of the Harvard Crimson and Yale Law Journal.

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Paul A. Gigot is the Editorial Page Editor and Vice President of The Wall Street Journal, a position he has held since 2001. He is responsible for the newspaper’s editorials, op-ed articles, and Leisure and Arts criticism. Mr. Gigot also directs the editorial pages of the Journal’s Asian and European editions as well as its OpinionJournal.com Web pages. He is the moderator of the paper’s weekly half-hour news program, The Journal Report, on the Fox News Channel.

After graduating from Dartmouth College, where he served as chairman of the daily student newspaper, Mr. Gigot began his career as a professional journalist at The National Review. A foundation grant then sent him to work in Asia for the Far Eastern Economic Review. In 1980, Mr. Gigot joined The Wall Street Journal as a reporter in Chicago covering banking and real estate. In 1982, he became the Journal’s Asia correspondent, based in Hong Kong, where he won an Overseas Press Club award for his coverage of the Philippines. Mr. Gigot became the first editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia in 1984.

Taking a one-year leave of absence from the Journal, Mr. Gigot served as a White House Fellow in 1986-87 at the White House and Treasury Department. He returned to the paper as a Washington-based editorial writer and political columnist. Mr. Gigot won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2000 for his column, “Potomac Watch.” During this time, he also became a regular political analyst on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS.

Upholding the highest standards of his profession, Mr. Gigot produces the most influential and widely read editorial page supporting free markets, the ideas of liberty, and strong national security. For his achievements, he was honored by the Wisconsin Historical Society, which presented him with the 2006 Lucius W. Neiman Award for Distinction in Journalism and Communications.

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Bradley A. Smith is the Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Designated Professor of Law at Capital University Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute. One of the nation’s leading authorities on election law and campaign finance, Professor Smith was nominated by President Clinton to a seat on the Federal Election Commission in 2000, where he served for five years, including serving as Commission Chairman in 2004.

Professor Smith’s writings have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Journal of Regulation, Pennsylvania Law Review, and other leading law journals. He is the author of the widely acclaimed book Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform (2001). Professor Smith also writes regularly for popular publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and National Review. His academic work has been cited in a number of Supreme Court decisions, including the majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Elections, decided in 2010.

Professor Smith is a frequent guest lecturer at the nation’s law schools and has made many media appearances on network and cable television programs. He represented the Inter-American Institute for Human Rights as an election observer overseas and has addressed election officials from developing democracies.

In 2005, Professor Smith founded the Center for Competitive Politics, of which he continues to serve as Chairman. Through the Center, he has filed amicus briefs in numerous campaign finance and political speech cases at the Supreme Court. Prior to attending Harvard Law School, Professor Smith served as U.S. Vice Consul in Equador and as Executive Director of the Small Business Association in Michigan.

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John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics, Stanford University. He is also the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

A leading expert on monetary policy, fiscal policy, and international economics, Professor Taylor served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 2001 to 2005. His book Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World chronicles this period.

In the past, Professor Taylor served as a senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors in 1976-1977 and as a member from 1989 to 1991. He was a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisors from 1995 to 2001. Since 1981, Professor Taylor has been a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Currently, he is a member of the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, where he previously served from 1996 to 1998. Professor Taylor also chairs the Working Group on Economic Policy at the Hoover Institution.

In his landmark 1993 paper Discretion versus Policy Rules in Practice, Professor Taylor proposed the celebrated “Taylor Rule,” which is used by central bankers worldwide as a guide to setting interest rates. A champion of the role of free markets and rules-based policies for achieving long-term economic growth, Professor Taylor is the author most recently of Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis (2010). He is also co-editor of the book Ending Government Bailouts as We Know Them (2010).

Professor Taylor is the recipient of a number of prestigious professional awards for excellence in research, teaching, public service, and policy making. He received a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

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Sir Martin Gilbert is the author of eighty-two books; for the totality of his published work he received a Doctorate of Literature from the University of Oxford. He has also authored twelve historical atlases, including Atlas of American History, Atlas of Russian History and The Arab-Israel Conflict Its History in Maps.

In 1962 Sir Martin began work as a research assistant for Randolph Churchill on his biography of his father; on Randolph’s death in 1968 he became the official biographer of Winston Churchill. He has published six volumes of Churchill biography Winston S. Churchill, and the one-volume Churchill, A Life. One of his most recent books is Churchill and America.

Sir Martin has edited twelve volumes of Churchill documents, the most recent being 1941: The Ever-Widening War. He is now working on the document volumes for 1942 to 1965. His books on Jewish themes include Churchill and the Jews, a comprehensive Atlas of the Holocaust, a general history The Holocaust, The Jewish Tragedy, and The Righteous, the Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, about Christians who risked their lives to save Jews.

Among Sir Martin’s other publications are Second World War, First World War, and the three-volume A History of the Twentieth Century. He has also written books on The Somme, D-Day, and The Day the War Ended. His most recent book is his pioneering Atlas of the Second World War.

Sir Martin has lectured widely, including at the Ministry of Defence in Moscow, and, in Washington at the State Department, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the White House. In 1995 he accompanied the British Prime Minister John Major to Israel, Gaza, Jordan, and Washington. In 2008 he accompanied the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on his official visit to Israel. He lives in London with his wife Esther, and is a Distinguished Fellow of Hillsdale College, Michigan.

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Arnold C. Harberger has worked in the field of policy economics for more than 50 years. He has written widely on cost-benefit analysis, tax policy, monetary policy, the economics of real exchange rates, and international economics. He has dealt with policy issues in the United States and in many other countries, including all Latin American countries except Cuba, plus Azerbaijan, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, the Philippines and Russia. He has worked extensively with the IMF, the World Bank and other international organizations, but his heaviest time commitments have been to USAID, with which he has worked from its inception in 1961(as well as with its predecessor agency, ICA, from 1956 to 1961). Starting in 2006, he has served as chief economic advisor to USAID.

His books and monographs include Project Evaluation, Taxation and Welfare, World Economic Growth (ed.), and On the Process of Growth and Economic Policy in Developing Countries. In addition he has produced over 300 professional articles and technical studies.

Harberger is past president of the American Economic Association, the Western Economic Association and the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Harberger has stated may times, however, that he takes more pride in the achievements of his former students than in any of the items mentioned above. More than fifty of them have held important policy positions (ministers, central bank presidents, budget directors, etc.), mostly in Latin American but also in other parts of the world. In these posts they have instituted important reforms--opening their economies and rationalizing their tax, expenditure and regulatory systems. In many cases, the reforms they implemented in one country were subsequently adopted by others. In all these efforts, the guiding principles have been those of sound economic theory and market orientation.

Harberger has served on the faculties of Johns Hopkins University (1949-53), the University of Chicago (1953-91) and UCLA (1991-) He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1950) and has received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Tucuman, the Catholic University of Chile, Universidad Tecnologica Centroamericana, Universidad Americana, Universidad Francisco Marroquin and Instituto Tecnologica Autonomo de Mexico.

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William Kristol is founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, a journal of politics and ideas located in Washington, D.C. He is also a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday, a contributor for the Fox News Channel and a monthly columnist for the Washington Post. Before starting the Weekly Standard in 1995, Mr. Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future, where he helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 Republican congressional victory. Prior to that, Mr. Kristol served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the first Bush Administration, and to Education Secretary William Bennett under President Reagan. Before coming to Washington in 1985, Mr. Kristol was on the faculty of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (1983-1985) and the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania (1979-1983).

Mr. Kristol has published widely in areas ranging from foreign policy to constitutional law to political philosophy. He has co-edited several books, including The Neoconservative Imagination (with Christopher DeMuth, 1995), Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield (with Mark Blitz, 2000), Present Dangers (with Robert Kagan, 2000), Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (with E. J. Dionne, Jr., 2001), and The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics (with Eric Cohen, 2002). He is the co-author, with Lawrence Kaplan, of the best-selling 2003 book, The War Over Iraq.

Mr. Kristol received both his A.B. (1973) and Ph.D. (1979) from Harvard University.

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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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