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  Laurence H. Tribe

  Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard, has taught at its Law School since 1968 and was voted the best professor by the graduating class of 2000. The title “University Professor” is Harvard’s highest academic honor, awarded to just a handful of professors at any given time and to fewer than 75 professors in all of Harvard University’s history. Born in China to Russian Jewish refugees, Tribe entered Harvard at 16. He graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics (1962) and magna cum laude in Law (1966); clerked for the California and U.S. Supreme Courts (1966-68); received tenure at 30; was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2010; helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands; and has received eleven honorary degrees, most recently a degree honoris causa from the Government of Mexico in March 2011 that was never before awarded to an American, and an LL.D from Columbia University. Professor Tribe has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases he has argued (including 35 in the U.S. Supreme Court); was appointed in 2010 by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to serve as the first Senior Counselor for Access to Justice. He has written 115 books and articles, most recently, To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment (co-authored with Joshua Matz). His treatise, “American Constitutional Law,” has been cited more than any other legal text since 1950. Former Solicitor General Erwin Griswold wrote: “[N]o book, and no lawyer not on the [Supreme] Court, has ever had a greater influence on the development of American constitutional law,” and the Northwestern Law Review opined that no-one else “in American history has… simultaneously achieved Tribe’s preeminence… as a practitioner and… scholar of constitutional law.”

  Laurence H. Tribe

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  Vivian Schiller

  Vivian Schiller joined the Aspen Institute in January 2020 as Executive Director of Aspen Digital, which empowers policymakers, civic organizations, companies, and the public to be responsible stewards of technology and media in the service of an informed, just, and equitable world.

  A longtime executive at the intersection of journalism, media and technology, Schiller has held executive roles at some of the most respected media organizations in the world. Those include: President and CEO of NPR; Global Chair of News at Twitter; General Manager of NYTimes.com; Chief Digital Officer of NBC News; Chief of the Discovery Times Channel, a joint venture of The New York Times and Discovery Communications; and Head of CNN documentary and long form divisions. Documentaries and series produced under her auspices earned multiple honors, including three Peabody Awards, four Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards, and dozens of Emmys.

  Schiller is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and a Director of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.

  Vivian Schiller

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  Eric H. Holder, Jr.

  Eric H. Holder, Jr. serves as Chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. Mr. Holder is an internationally recognized leader on a broad range of legal issues and a staunch advocate for civil rights. He served in the Obama Administration as the 82nd Attorney General of the United States from February 2009 to April 2015, the third longest-serving Attorney General in U.S. history and the first African American to hold that office.

  Under Mr. Holder’s leadership, civil rights, including voting rights, were a top priority at the Justice Department. Mr. Holder vigorously defended voting rights, including the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He criticized politically motivated voter ID laws that were designed to suppress minority and youth votes, and he led the Justice Department’s efforts to overturn these laws around the country.

  Including his tenure as Attorney General, Mr. Holder served in government for more than thirty years, having been appointed to various positions requiring U.S. Senate confirmation by Presidents Obama, Clinton, and Reagan. He began his legal career at the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Justice Department. In 1988, President Reagan appointed him to serve as a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.

  In 1993, Mr. Holder stepped down from the bench to accept an appointment from President Clinton as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. He held that position until he became the first African-American Deputy Attorney General in 1997. From 2001 until his confirmation as Attorney General, Mr. Holder was a partner at Covington & Burling LLP, where he advised clients on complex investigations and litigation matters. He rejoined the firm in 2015.

  In 2014, Time magazine named Mr. Holder to its list of 100 Most Influential People, noting that he had “worked tirelessly to ensure equal justice.” The National Legal Aid & Defender Association has honored him with the Justice John Paul Stevens Lifetime Achievement Award for his leadership in bolstering civil rights and access to justice. The National Urban League named him a recipient of their Living Legend award. Mr. Holder was also awarded the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s National Board of Directors.

  Mr. Holder was born in the Bronx, New York and grew up in East Elmhurst, Queens. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University.

  Eric H. Holder, Jr.

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  Nse Ufot

  Nse Ufot is the Chief Executive Officer of the New Georgia Project (NGP) and its affiliate, New Georgia Project Action Fund (NGP AF). Nse leads both organizations with a data-informed approach and a commitment to developing tools that leverage technology to make it easier for every voter to engage in every election. Nse and her team are also developing Georgia’s home-grown talent by training and organizing local activists across the state. She has dedicated her life and career to working on civil, human and workers’ rights issues and leads two organizations whose complementary aim is to strengthen Georgia’s democracy. Under Nse’s leadership, NGP has registered over 500K Georgians to vote.

  Nse Ufot

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  María Teresa Kumar

  María Teresa Kumar is the founding CEO of Voto Latino and Voto Latino Foundation and an Emmy-nominated on-air analyst for MSNBC. As the country’s largest Latinx voter registration and mobilization organization, Voto Latino has played a decisive role in American elections and been a major voice countering disinformation in the Latino community. Under María Teresa’s leadership, this work has garnered numerous awards and recognitions.

  María Teresa began her career as a Senior Legislative Aide on Capitol Hill where she worked on appropriations and trade policy. She is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, an international affairs graduate of the University of California at Davis, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a board member of Emily’s List. María Teresa has dedicated her career to engaging the public to build democracy and protect human rights.

  María Teresa Kumar

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  Emily Bazelon

  Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, and a co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, a popular weekly podcast. She is the author of two national bestsellers published by Penguin Random House: Charged, about the power of prosecutors, and Sticks and Stones, about how to prevent bullying. Charged won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the current interest category and the Silver Gavel Book Award from the American Bar Association.

  Before joining the Times Magazine, Emily was a writer and editor for nine years at Slate. She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

  Emily Bazelon

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  Jay Rosen

  Jay Rosen has been teaching journalism at New York University since 1986. He is the author of PressThink, a blog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, What Are Journalists For?, which is about the rise of the civic journalism movement during the pre-internet era. In 2017 he became director of the Membership Puzzle Project. It studies membership models for sustainability in news. Rosen is also an active press critic with a focus on problems in the coverage of politics. On Twitter he is @jayrosen_nyu.

  Jay Rosen

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  S. Mitra Kalita

  S. Mitra Kalita is a veteran journalist, media executive, prolific commentator and author of two books. Once described as “wonderfully blunt” by CNN anchor Brian Stelter, she is a change agent, loves writing headlines and framing stories, and blends digital strategy and audience-centric approaches while advocating for diversity and better management of our newsrooms. During Twitter debates on the definition of journalism (objectivity, view from nowhere, both sides!), Mitra prefers to spend her time committing it. Recently, she launched Epicenter-NYC, a newsletter to help New Yorkers get through the pandemic. Mitra has also recently co-founded a new media company called URL Media, a network of Black and Brown owned media organizations that share content, distribution and revenues to increase their long-term sustainability. She's on the board of the Philadelphia Inquirer and writes a weekly column for Time Magazine. Mitra was most recently SVP at CNN Digital, overseeing the national news, breaking news, programming, opinion and features teams. She led the launch of Live Story, a tool that helps audiences follow stories in real time. Her philosophy on the “arc of a story” has been cited and emulated in news outlets across the country. Mitra has been a board member and visiting faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, teaching in its women’s academy, program for journalists of color and a seminar for new managers. She teaches in the accelerator program of the Online News Association. She’s been an adjunct at Columbia Journalism School, St. John’s University, CUNY Journalism School and UMass-Amherst. She was previously managing editor for editorial strategy at the Los Angeles Times. During her year there, she helped latimes.com traffic soar to nearly 60 million uniques monthly, innovated new forms of storytelling and audience engagement, and connected the Times to new communities via events, new beats, translations and partnerships. Oh, and the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the attacks on San Bernardino. She served as the executive editor (at large) for Quartz, Atlantic Media’s global economy site, and was its founding ideas editor. She also oversaw the launches of Quartz India and Quartz Africa. She worked previously at the Wall Street Journal, where she directed coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and reported on the housing crisis as a senior writer. She was a founding editor of Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. She is the author of two books related to migration and globalization, including the highly acclaimed Suburban Sahibs, and speaks seven languages (but only four of them half decently). She previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey—with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. Jackson Heights has been home, on and off, for the last 20 years. She is married to the artist Nitin Mukul and they have two daughters and one mutt. She tweets @mitrakalita.

  S. Mitra Kalita

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  Margaret Sullivan

  Margaret Sullivan is the Washington Post’s media columnist. She is the former public editor of the New York Times and the former chief editor of the Buffalo News, her hometown daily where she started as a summer intern. She is the author of Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and Crisis of American Democracy.

  Margaret Sullivan

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  Carol Anderson

  Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.

  Carol Anderson

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  Ellen Fitzpatrick

  Ellen Fitzpatrick is a professor and scholar specializing in modern American political and intellectual history, and the author and editor of eight books, including The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016), the New York Times bestselling, Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation (Ecco, 2010); History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880-1980 (Harvard University Press, 2002); America in Modern Times, co-authored with Alan Brinkley (McGraw Hill, 1997); Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (Oxford University Press, 1990), an updated edition of Eleanor Flexner's classic study of the women's rights movement, Century of Struggle (Harvard University Press, 1996) as well as many articles and reviews. Letters to Jackie became the basis for a 2014 documentary film by Bill Couturié entitled Letters to Jackie: Remembering President Kennedy for which Fitzpatrick served as Associate Producer. The Highest Glass Ceiling was selected as a 2016 “Editor's Choice” by the New York Times, and a notable nonfiction book of 2016 by the Washington Post. It was also excerpted in The New Yorker. Fitzpatrick, who holds a PhD in History from Brandeis University, is Presidential Chair and Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and has taught previously at Harvard University, M.I.T. and Wellesley College.

  Ellen Fitzpatrick

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  Kimberly Wehle

  Kimberly Wehle is law professor, author, lawyer and former CBS News legal analyst. She writes for Politico, The Atlantic, The Bulwark, and The Hill, and provides regular legal commentary for CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, among many other outlets. At the University of Baltimore School of Law, her teaching and scholarship focuses on the separation of powers, administrative agencies, and civil litigation. She is the recipient of the 2020 University System of Maryland Board of Regents Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship. She is a former Assistant United States Attorney, Associate Independent Counsel in the Whitewater Investigation, and author of the books What You Need to Know about Voting—and Why and How to Read The Constitution—and Why. Her forthcoming book is How to Think Like a Lawyer—A Common Sense Guide to Everyday Dilemmas. Follow Kim on Twitter and Instagram, where she hosts a weekly show, #SimplePolitics, which also resides on YouTube.

  Kimberly Wehle

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  Farai Chideya

  Farai Chideya is the creator and host of Our Body Politic, a nationally syndicated public radio show, podcast and insights brand centering Black women and all women of color as we seek to build a better nation and world. She recently served as a program officer for journalism at the Ford Foundation. She’s the author of six books, including The Episodic Career: How to Thrive at Work in the Age of Disruption. Chideya has covered every Presidential election from 1996 on; worked for FivethirtyEight, NPR, CNN, ABC, and NPR; and appeared on numerous other networks. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, she graduated from Harvard University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Farai Chideya

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  Garrett Graff

  Garrett Graff, a director for cyber initiatives for the Aspen Digital program at the Aspen Institute, is an award-winning journalist who has spent nearly a decade covering national security. He has an extensive background in journalism and technology, including working as Governor Howard Dean’s first webmaster, helping to launch an internet strategy consulting firm, and, in 2005, becoming the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing. More recently, as a journalist, he’s been editor of both Washingtonian and POLITICO Magazine — where he helped lead the magazine to its first National Magazine Award — and writes regularly for publications like WIRED and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

  He has authored multiple books on both technology and national security, including, most recently, Raven Rock, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, which was published in May 2017, as well as a 2011 history of the FBI, The Threat Matrix.

  Garrett Graff

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  Errin Haines

  Errin Haines is editor at large and a founding mother of The 19th, a nonprofit, independent newsroom focused on the intersection of gender, politics and policy. She is also an MSNBC Contributor.

  Prior to joining The 19th, Errin was national writer on race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. She has also worked at The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel.

  Errin’s expertise on issues of race, gender and politics make her a sought-after voice and thought leader in her industry. She has taught classes on race, gender and the 2020 election at the Georgetown University Institute of Politics and Princeton University.

  Errin is currently writing her first book, Twice As Good, exploring the growth of Black women’s power and leadership through Vice President Kamala Harris’ historic ascent and the rise of other notable trailblazers boldly asserting their roles in American democracy and society.

  A native of Atlanta, Errin is based in Philadelphia.

  Errin Haines

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  Rashad Robinson

  Rashad Robinson is President of Color Of Change, a leading racial justice organization with more than 7 million members. Rashad designs winning strategies to build power for Black communities: moving prosecutors to reduce mass incarceration and police violence; forcing over 100 corporations to abandon the right-wing policy shop, ALEC; forcing corporations to stop supporting Trump initiatives and white nationalists; winning net neutrality as a civil rights issue; changing representations of race in Hollywood; moving Airbnb, Google and Facebook to implement anti-racist initiatives; forcing Bill O’Reilly off the air. Rashad appears regularly in major news media and as a keynote speaker nationally. He was among the first in a global cohort of Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, and previously wrote a monthly column about race, politics and corporate accountability for The Guardian. Previously, Rashad served as Senior Director of Media Programs at GLAAD. Rashad is currently the Co-Chair of the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder and serves on the boards of the Hazen Foundation and Marguerite Casey Foundation.

  Rashad Robinson

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  Sylvia Albert

  As Director of Voting and Elections, Sylvia works with national staff and Common Cause state offices to press for reforms that expand access to the ballot for eligible voters and promote fair representation in our democracy.

  Sylvia has more than a decade of professional experience in public interest law and public policy campaigns in voting and fair housing. She has spent her career fighting to expand ballot access, reduce barriers to participation, and combat voter intimidation among historically disenfranchised communities. She also worked to enforce the Fair Housing Act and affirmatively further fair housing while at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

  Sylvia holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from University of California, Berkeley and a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center.

  Sylvia Albert

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  Trey Grayson

  Trey Grayson is a member of the Florence, Kentucky office of the law firm Frost Brown Todd and managing director of the firm’s government relations affiliate, CivicPoint.

  Trey served as a two-term Secretary of State for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The youngest secretary of state in the country at the time of his election, he served as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State and the Chair of the Republican Association of Secretaries of State.

  Trey continues to be recognized as a national leader in election modernization, including serving on the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration following the 2012 election. He currently serves as a board member of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and works with several additional groups and organizations to secure and modernize our elections, including the Democracy Works, Secure Elections Project, the National Task Force on Election Crises, and National Council on Election Integrity. He also serves as a member of the advisory committees for States United Democracy Center, Issue One, the Election Official Legal Defense Network, and the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

  After leaving the Secretary of State’s office, Trey returned to his alma mater to serve as the Director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics from 2011-2014, before returning home to become President & CEO of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

  Trey is very active in civic and charitable organizations at the local, state, and national levels, including serving on the boards of Leadership Kentucky and ArtsWave, and as chair of the boards of Aviatra, an accelerator for women-owned businesses, and the Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program.

  He resides in Boone County, Kentucky, with his wife, Nancy, and daughters, Alex and Kate. He received an A.B. with honors from Harvard College in 1994 and a JD/MBA from the University of Kentucky in 1998.

  Trey Grayson

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  Will Hurd

  Will Hurd is a former member of Congress, cybersecurity executive, and undercover officer in the CIA. For almost two decades he’s been involved in the most pressing national security issues challenging the country whether it was in the back-alleys of dangerous places, boardrooms of top international businesses or halls of Congress.

  After stopping terrorists, preventing Russian spies from stealing our secrets, and putting nuclear weapons proliferators out of business, Will helped build a cybersecurity company that prepared businesses for the next domain of conflict – cyberspace.

  While in Congress, Texas Monthly and Politico Magazine called Will “The Future of the GOP,” because he put good policy over good politics at a time when America was often consumed with what divides us rather than what unites us. He was able to get more legislation signed into law in three terms than most congressmen do in three decades – substantive legislation like a national strategy for Artificial Intelligence.

  Will is a native of San Antonio and earned a Computer Science degree from Texas A&M University. He is growing the US transatlantic partnership with Europe as a trustee of the German Marshall Fund and is serving as a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

  Will Hurd

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  Yasmin Green

  Yasmin Green is the Director of Research and Development for Jigsaw, a unit within Google building technology to make the world safer from global security challenges. In her role, Yasmin leads an interdisciplinary team to forecast threats and validate technology interventions. She has pioneered new approaches to counter violent extremism and state-sponsored disinformation, including seeding the world’s first online network of former violent extremists and survivors of terrorism, launching a new advertising-based program to confront online radicalization called the Redirect Method, and informing cross-platform responses to coordinated disinformation campaigns.

  Yasmin actively advises and leads security initiatives outside Jigsaw. She is a Senior Advisor on Innovation to Oxford Analytica and the Harvard Belfer Center’s Defending Digital Democracy Project, a member of the Aspen Cyber Strategy Group, an Anti-Defamation League board member, and co-chaired the European Commission's’ Working Group on Online Radicalization from 2014-2015.

  Additionally, Yasmin has been named one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40” most influential young leaders and one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business,” and serves on the Board of the Tory Burch Foundation.

  Yasmin Green

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  Alicia Wanless

  Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. With a growing international multi-stakeholder community, the Partnership aims to foster evidence-based policymaking to counter threats within the information environment. Wanless is currently a PhD Researcher at King’s College London exploring how the information environment can be studied in similar ways to the physical environment. She is also a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and was a tech advisor to Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Her work has been featured in Lawfare, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, and CBC.

  Alicia Wanless

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  Sean Morales-Doyle

  Sean Morales-Doyle serves as the acting director in the Democracy Program, where he focuses on voting rights and elections. He advocates for pro-voter reforms like automatic voter registration and voting rights restoration while fighting back against voter suppression efforts in the courts. Morales-Doyle is a seasoned litigator with experience in civil rights and constitutional matters, as well as a background in labor and employment law.

  Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Morales-Doyle was a shareholder at Despres, Schwartz & Geoghegan, Ltd., in Chicago. He litigated all manner of civil rights and constitutional matters and represented workers and unions in a wide variety of labor and employment cases.

  Morales-Doyle earned both his undergraduate and law degrees from Northwestern University. After law school, he served as an assistant attorney general for the State of Illinois in the Special Litigation Bureau, where he investigated and litigated cases involving consumer fraud and false claims. He then served as a law clerk to Hon. William J. Hibbler of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

  Sean Morales-Doyle

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  David Greenberg

  David Greenberg is a Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is currently writing a biography of Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights leader, for Simon & Schuster. He is the author or editor of several books on American history and politics including Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (2003); Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016); Calvin Coolidge (2006); and Alan Brinkley: A Life in History (2019). Formerly acting editor of the New Republic and columnist for Slate, he now writes for Politico, among many other scholarly and popular publications. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale and lives with his family in Manhattan.

  David Greenberg

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  Carolyn Lukensmeyer

  Dr. Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer was the first Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, an organization that works to reduce political dysfunction and incivility in our political system. As a leader in the field of deliberative democracy, she works to restore our democracy to reflect the intended vision of our founding fathers.

  Dr. Lukensmeyer previously served as Founder and President of AmericaSpeaks, an award-winning nonprofit organization that promoted nonpartisan initiatives to engage citizens and leaders through the development of innovative public policy tools and strategies. During her tenure, AmericaSpeaks engaged more than 200,000 people and hosted events across all 50 states and throughout the world. Dr. Lukensmeyer formerly served as Consultant to the White House Chief of Staff from 1993-94 and on the National Performance Review where she steered internal management and oversaw government-wide reforms. She was the Chief of Staff to Ohio Governor Richard F. Celeste from 1986-91, becoming the first woman to serve in this capacity. She earned her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University and has completed postgraduate training at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.

  Carolyn Lukensmeyer

A Part of the Newmark Civic Life Series