Paul Finkelman is a specialist in American legal history, race relations and the law, and the First Amendment. He is the author of more than 200 scholarly articles and more than forty books. He is an expert on the law of slavery, constitutional law, religious liberty, African American history, the American Civil War, and legal issues surrounding baseball. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, and numerous other print and on line publications. He has appeared on PBS, NPR, the History Channel, C-SPAN, and most major networks and in the full-length movie Up For Grabs. He was the expert witness in the lawsuit over the famous Alabama Ten Commandments Monument and in the lawsuit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball. His work on legal history and constitutional law has been cited four times by the United States Supreme Court, numerous other courts, and in many appellate briefs. He has lectured in almost every American state, in Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, and before the United Nations. He has held endowed chairs at, among other places, Duke University, Louisiana State University, University of Tulsa, Albany Law School, and the University of Saskatchewan.
 

George Freeman is Executive Director of the Media Law Resource Center, which is a a non-profit trade association supporting the media industry in legal matters; its membership includes 125 media companies from ABC to Yahoo! and 200 law firms that represent media clients.

For over 30 years George worked as a First Amendment attorney in the Legal Department of The New York Times Company, leaving in 2012 as Vice President and Assistant General Counsel (a title he had held since 1992). He was primarily responsible for the company’s litigations and counseled the newsrooms of the Times newspaper and the newsrooms of the company’s affiliated newspapers, television stations, and magazines. He also was involved in antitrust and distribution problems, employment relations, and business counseling. He was at the forefront of a number of high-profile cases for The Times, including reporter Judy Miller’s battle not to reveal her confidential sources in the Scooter Libby case and quarterback Ken Stabler’s libel case against The Times.

He is a frequent lecturer and moderator of panels on First Amendment issues and has been on the Practising Law Institute’s Communications Law faculty since 1985. He also was the co-founder and for 20 years was co-chair of the Boca Conference, a winter meeting on First Amendment issues bringing together 250 media attorneys nationwide. He has participated in a conference in Moscow on “Democratic Governance and a Free Press” with Russian government officials and has toured China as a member of the New York Bar Association Delegation.

He is the William J. Brennan Visiting Professor at the Columbia Journalism School and also teaches First Amendment law at New York University and CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Amherst and the Harvard Law School and is an avid tennis player.
 

Dr. Kenneth W. Harl, Professor of Classical History at Tulane University in New Orleans, teaches courses in Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Viking, and Crusader history. He earned his B.A. from Trinity College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He is recognized as an outstanding lecturer, receiving many teaching awards at Tulane, and Baylor University’s nationwide Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers. Professor Harl is an expert in the study of coins, both ancient and Medieval, publishing a wide variety of articles and two major books on numismatics: Civic Coins and Civic Politics in the Roman East, A.D. 180–275 and Coinage in the Roman Economy, 300 B.C. to A.D. 700. He is currently finishing a book on coins unearthed in an excavation of Gordion, Turkey. He has also begun a new book on Rome and her Iranian foes in which he will combine literary sources, archaeology, and coins to explain how Rome came to dominate the Middle East. Professor Harl is a fellow and trustee of the American Numismatic Society; he is on the governing board of the American Research Institute in Turkey; and has served in various positions of the American Institute for Archaeology and the Association of Ancient Historians.
 

Steven Lee Myers is a correspondent in the Washington Bureau of The New York Times who covers foreign policy and national security issues. He returned recently from Moscow, where he worked as bureau chief in 2013 and 2014. He previously served as a correspondent and bureau chief there from 2002 to 2007, covering Russia and the other former Soviet republics. He is the author of a biography of Vladimir Putin, entitled The New Tsar, published by Alfred A. Knopf Books in September 2015.

Mr. Myers began his career at The Times in 1989 and worked in New York City until moving to Washington in 1996, where he covered first the State Department and then the Pentagon through the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

He has reported on conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq. In 2003, he was “embedded” with the Army’s Third Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq and reported extensively on the division’s experience there and back home that year. He returned to Iraq as a correspondent and bureau chief from 2009 to 2011.

In Washington, he also covered the White House during the presidency of George W. Bush and has written on the State Department during the tenures now of five different Secretaries of State, most recently Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry.

Born in Los Angeles in 1965, Mr. Myers received a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with honors in 1987. As a Rotary International scholar, he received a master’s degree, with distinction, in literature and art history from the University of Reading, Reading, England in 1989.