Regent University School of Law Alumni & Friends Weekend

Jim Campbell serves as chief legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where he leads the U.S. Legal Advocacy team. Before taking that position at ADF in March 2023, Campbell was the Solicitor General in the office of Nebraska Attorney General Douglas J. Peterson and Michael T. Hilgers. In that role, he represented the state of Nebraska in cases before state and federal courts and oversaw all civil appeals for the state. In February 2023, Campbell argued Biden v. Nebraska before the U.S. Supreme Court, a case in which Nebraska and five other states successfully challenged the Biden administration’s attempt to forgive over $400 billion in federal student loans for over 40 million individuals. Before joining the Nebraska Attorney General’s office in January 2020, Campbell worked as senior counsel for ADF, defending his clients’ religious freedom and freedom of speech, with a particular focus on appellate work. Campbell has also authored many articles and legal commentary pieces, including some published by USA Today and The Washington Post. A native of northeastern Ohio, Campbell earned his Juris Doctor from the University of Akron School of Law, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2006. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Alice M. Batchelder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Campbell is admitted to the state bars of Ohio, Arizona, and Nebraska. He is also admitted to multiple federal district and appellate courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He received his B.A. from Louisiana State University in 1994, his J.D. from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University in 1997, and his LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 2004.

After graduating from law school, he clerked for Circuit Judge John Malcolm Duhé Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

From 2008–2012, Duncan served as Appellate Chief for Louisiana’s Attorney General’s office. From 2012–2014, he served as general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. From 2004-2008, he was an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi School of Law.

Before becoming a judge, Duncan practiced at the Washington, D.C. firm of Schaerr Duncan LLP, where he was a founding partner. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on May 1, 2018.

Erin Morrow Hawley serves as senior counsel to the appellate team at Alliance Defending Freedom and senior legal fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. Hawley has formerly practiced appellate law at several large law firms, litigating extensively before the U.S. Supreme Court. She also worked at the Department of Justice, serving as counsel to Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

As an academic, Hawley served as an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri. She also taught constitutional law as a senior fellow at the Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy. Her scholarship focuses primarily on federal courts and has been published in numerous top journals.

Hawley is a frequent commentator on legal issues. Her work has been featured in World Magazine, USA Today, Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the Legal Times, and the Hill, among others. Hawley has also written a book on motherhood, entitled “Living Beloved: Lessons From My Little Ones About the Heart of God.”

Hawley is a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit. Hawley received her bachelor’s degree in Animal Science from Texas A&M University and her law degree from Yale Law School.

Lili Pirc is a 3L honors student at Regent University School of Law, where she serves as the co-Symposium Editor of the Regent University Law Review, an intern for the Robertson Center for Constitutional Law, and a member of the Regent Law Honor Council. This fall, she will extern for the Idaho Solicitor General’s office. Pirc has interned in the Office of the Solicitor General of Arizona and at Spero Law, L.L.C. She has assisted with litigation before the United States Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals and participated in the administrative rulemaking process by drafting comment letters to challenge federal regulations. Pirc contributed to an amicus brief in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the case in which the Supreme Court will examine the validity of Chevron deference. She is a Blackstone Fellow of the class of 2022, a First Liberty Institute Fellow, and a Delegate of Alliance Defending Freedom’s Areté Academy. Pirc graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Arts in History and served as an editor of the Arizona Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Upon graduation, Pirc plans to specialize in constitutional appellate litigation and to move with her husband to Idaho, where they hope to start a family.

Joseph Postell is the Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches courses on American politics, Congress, political parties, and administrative law. He is also a Visiting Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. He previously was an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he was also the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual. His research focuses primarily on American political institutions and their relationship to the modern administrative state. He is the author of Bureaucracy in America: The Administrative State’s Challenge to Constitutional Government, and the editor of Rediscovering Political Economy (with Bradley C.S. Watson), Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism During the Progressive Era (with Johnathan O’Neill), and American Citizenship and Constitutionalism in Principle and Practice (with Steven F. Pittz).  His articles have appeared in a variety of journals and law reviews, including the George Mason Law Review, the Georgetown Review of Law and Public Policy, the Missouri Law Review, the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty, American Political Thought, Constitutional Studies, Perspectives on Political Science, the Review of Politics, and Social Philosophy and Policy.  He is also a frequent contributor to the Liberty Fund’s Law and Liberty website. Postell graduated from Ashland University, where he was an Ashbrook Scholar.

The Honorable Paul J. Ray leads The Heritage Foundation’s work on regulatory and economic policy as Director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Ray brings to the role wide experience at the highest levels of government and private practice, including service as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—the federal “regulations czar”—within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, to which position he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in January 2020. As Administrator, Ray supervised the review of hundreds of regulations and led federal efforts on regulatory reform. Before his time at OIRA, Ray served as counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor and an attorney specializing in administrative appellate law. He began his legal career with clerkships for Judge Debra Ann Livingston of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Justice Samuel A. Alito of the United States Supreme Court. Ray’s research focuses on administrative law and policy, the American Founding and constitutional order, and political philosophy, with a special focus on subsidiarity and the common good. He is a frequent speaker in Washington and around the country on the federal regulatory system. In addition to his work at Heritage, Ray is a member of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society’s Administrative Law Practice Group. He also serves on the Board of Innovations in Peacebuilding International, which promotes peaceful, ground-up solutions in war-torn regions. Ray is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served on the Harvard Law Review, and holds a bachelor’s degree from Hillsdale College.

Roger Severino is Vice President of Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation. During the Trump Administration he led the HHS Office for Civil Rights and was the longest serving Director of the past three decades. At HHS, Severino led a team of over 250 staff enforcing civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He previously worked as the Director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage, as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and as Legal Counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. Severino holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in Public Policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in Business from the University of Southern California. Severino has been profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill, and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, among others. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed him and his wife, Carrie, “a conservative power couple.”

Dr. Jeffery J. Ventrella serves as Idaho’s Associate Attorney General. He also serves as a Senior Lecturing Fellow at Regent University School of Law. Previously, he worked at Alliance Defending Freedom as Senior Counsel and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs and Training. In this role, he designed the curriculum for, developed, and led ADF’s training programs, including the Blackstone Legal Fellowship and ADF International’s Areté Academy. Before his time at ADF, Dr. Ventrella litigated complex civil disputes at the trial and appellate levels as a partner at Elam & Burke, P.A.. Dr. Ventrella has served as a research fellow and a member of an ad hoc graduate thesis committee for the Department of Philosophy and Constitutional Law at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of Law and Culture for the Center for Cultural Leadership, a fellow with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity, a Senior Fellow for TruthXchange, and has been elected as a member of The Philadelphia Society. He serves as an appointed member of The Federalist Society’s Executive Committee and guides its Religious Liberties Practice Group. He is the author of The Cathedral Builder: Pursuing Cultural Beauty (2007) and numerous monographs and has contributed to nine books. Dr. Ventrella received a Bachelor of Music Education degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Northern Colorado, a Doctorate of Philosophy in Church and State Studies from Whitefield Theological Seminary, and a J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of the Law, where he was the Production Editor for the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Dr. Ventrella and his wife have five children.

Theo Wold serves as the Solicitor General of the State of Idaho and as a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He previously worked in the Trump administration as the Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice and as Deputy Assistant to the President for Policy in the Office of American Innovation. He also served as Deputy Chief Counsel to United States Senator Mike Lee on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Wold clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for Judge Janice Rogers Brown and on the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico for Judge José Antonio Fusté. He has lectured at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and was both a John Marshall Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a Madison Fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center. Wold also contributed to the book Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay (edited by Arthur Milikh) with his essay entitled “A Century of Impotency: Conservative Failure and the Administrative State.” He holds a B.A. from Georgetown University, where he studied government and English, an M. Litt. from the University of St. Andrews, where he studied English literature, and a J.D. from the University of Notre Dame. Theo and his wife have four children and live in Boise, Idaho.

Jonathan Wolfson is the Chief Legal Officer and Policy Director at the Cicero Institute, where he researches regulatory reform, healthcare, and employment policies and oversees the Cicero Law & Policy Fellowship. Before joining Cicero, Wolfson led the Policy Office at the U.S. Department of Labor, managing deregulatory efforts and overseeing DOL’s internal policy development think tank. He previously worked as a litigator and regulatory attorney at an international law firm and served as a policy analyst at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He clerked for Judge Edith Brown Clement of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Wolfson received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was an Olin Law and Economics Fellow and won the John M. Olin Prize for best original law and economics research.

Calling him a “man of great integrity, a man of great judgment and a man who knows the law,” President George W. Bush announced his decision to nominate John Ashcroft to serve as U.S. Attorney General on December 22, 2000. When Ashcroft left office four years later, violent crime was at a record low, gun crime was at an all-time low, a successful corporate crime crackdown had been launched, and more terrorist attacks on the U.S. had been prevented. One of the most high-profile and experienced Attorneys General in the nation’s history, Ashcroft led the U.S. law enforcement community through the challenging and transformational period following the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001. His tenure was highlighted by forceful public advocacy of President Bush’s strong anti-terrorism strategy. His quiet government influence was rated highest inside the Bush Administration by The National Journal. Raised in Springfield, Missouri, Ashcroft attended public schools until enrolling at Yale University, where he graduated with honors in 1964. He received his Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago in 1967. Prior to entering public service, Ashcroft taught business law at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He authored a book honoring his father, Lessons from a Father to His Son, and co-authored multiple editions of two college law textbooks with his wife, Janet. His career of public service began in 1973 as Missouri Auditor. He was later elected to two terms as the state’s Attorney General. His colleagues in the non-partisan National Association of Attorney’s General elected him as their President. Ashcroft served as Governor of Missouri from 1985 through 1993 where he balanced eight consecutive budgets. Fortune magazine rated him one of the top ten education governors, while Financial World and City and State magazines credited him with making Missouri one of the best financially managed states. In 1991, the non-partisan National Governor’s Association voted him Chairman. Ashcroft was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1994 and worked to reduce crime and safeguard the rights of crime victims. He co-sponsored a bill that designated 911 as the universal emergency number and was a leader in passing legislation directly responsible for allowing U.S. companies to utilize more aggressive encryption technology. During his entire career as a senator, Ashcroft served on the Commerce Committee where he advocated for updated U.S. banking laws, the protection of consumer privacy, and increased personal responsibility on the part of consumers. As U.S. Attorney General, Ashcroft reorganized the Justice Department to focus on its number one priority: to prevent another terrorist attack. Leveraging every legal tool available to law enforcement, including the critical tools provided in the USA PATRIOT Act, the Justice Department initiated a tough antiterrorism campaign that has assisted in disrupting over 150 terrorist plots worldwide, dismantling terrorist cells in cities across America, and convicting 191 individuals in terrorism-related investigations to date. At the direction of President Bush, the Department established the Corporate Fraud Task Force to restore integrity to the marketplace by cracking down on companies and corporate executives who abused the trust of their employees and investors. Violent crime was driven to a 30-year low as the Department employed tough tools and tough penalties against criminals who victimized the innocent. The Department implemented President Bush’s Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, increasing federal gun prosecutions by 76% and driving crimes with guns to a record low. Today, Ashcroft serves as the Chairman of The Ashcroft Group, LLC which provides confidential strategic consulting and crisis counseling to major international corporations. In 2005, Ashcroft was named a Distinguished Professor in the schools of Law and Government at Regent University.

Bradley J. Lingo, J.D., serves as the dean of Regent University School of Law. In 2022–2023, under the leadership of Dean Lingo, Regent Law set all-time records for enrollment, median LSAT, and U.S. News ranking.

Before becoming dean, Lingo co-founded Regent University’s Robertson Center for Constitutional Law and served as the school’s associate dean for Academic Affairs. In 2020, Regent University recognized Lingo’s scholarship with the Faculty Excellence Award. Regent’s student bar association named him Professor of the Year in 2022.

He has taught Contracts, State Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, and Appellate Advocacy. His research and advocacy focus on constitutional law and religious liberty. Lingo’s work has been published by, among others, the Regent University Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, George Mason Law Review Forum, Federalist Society, and National Review Online. He has filed amicus briefs on behalf of former members of Congress, religious organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, Young Life, InterVarsity, and the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, and in U.S. Supreme Court cases such as Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, and Groff v. DeJoy. His co-authors have included Hon. John Ashcroft and Hon. Kenneth Starr. Much of this work can be found at constitutionallaw.regent.edu/our-work.

Before joining the Regent faculty, Lingo was a partner in King & Spalding’s Trial and Global Disputes practice group. He routinely represented accounting firms and financial institutions in high-stakes litigation, including matters for three of the Big Four accounting firms where more than $1 billion was at stake. Among his other accomplishments, he was one of the trial lawyers in the highest-stakes case in U.S. history to be tried by an accounting firm to a complete defense verdict.

Lingo also litigated many pro bono and religious liberty matters while in private practice. Accounts of this work have appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. He served as president of the Federalist Society’s Charlotte Chapter and, by appointment of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the Commission’s North Carolina State Advisory Committee.

Before his career with King & Spalding, Lingo practiced in the Washington, D.C., office of Gibson Dunn. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Morris Sheppard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Lingo received his law degree with honors from Harvard Law School, where he served as an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He graduated first in his class and summa cum laude from Grove City College.

Gordon Robertson is the Chancellor of Regent University.

The son of Pat and Dede Robertson, Gordon graduated from Yale University in 1980 and earned his Juris Doctor degree from Washington and Lee University in 1984. He then practiced law in Norfolk, Virginia, for 10 years.

In 1994, Gordon had a profound encounter with the Lord and moved to the Philippines, where he established CBN Asia. The following year, he founded the Asian Center for Missions (ACM), dedicated to training and sending Asian missionaries throughout the world. ACM is now one of the largest missionary agencies in the Philippines with more than 2,000 graduates trained in cross-cultural missions.

In 1996, Gordon created CBN Asia’s flagship television show, The 700 Club Asia, which is now one of the longest-running Christian television shows in the Philippines and is distributed by satellite around the world. Also in 1996, CBN Asia started a humanitarian organization, Operation Blessing Philippines, which has been recognized as “NGO of the Year” by the Philippine government. Over the next three years, Gordon launched CBN centers in Indonesia, India, Hong Kong, Beijing and Thailand.

As Executive Producer of The 700 Club, Gordon oversees all aspects of programming for the ministry. He hosts CBN’s original flagship program, The 700 Club, as well as 700 Club Interactive, a daily show airing on Freeform and online, and Miracle Living Today.

The Executive Producer of CBN Films, Gordon has produced a number of documentaries and features, including:

• Oracles of God: The Story of the Old Testament
• Written in Stone four-part series: House of David, Kings and Prophets, Secrets of the Temple, and Jesus of Nazareth,
• The Asbury Awakening
• I Am Patrick: The Patron Saint of Ireland
• Treasures of the Second Temple
• Christmas: The Story Behind the Traditions 
• To Life: How Israeli Volunteers Are Changing the World
• In Our Hands: The Battle for Jerusalem
• The Hope: The Rebirth of Israel 
• Whose Land Is It? Jewish and Arab Claims to Israel
• Made in Israel
• Temple of Heaven, filmed in China

Gordon is also Executive Producer of CBN Animation’s Superbook, the reimagined animation series. Its guiding mission is to bring the stories of the Bible to the children of the world in their own languages. With over 65 episodes completed, the new Superbook has been broadcast to millions of viewers in dozens of languages around the globe.

Gordon and his wife, Katharyn, reside in Virginia and have three grown children.