Participant Biographies

Gerald Benjamin

Associate Vice President for Regional Engagement

Gerald Benjamin was appointed as Associate Vice President for Regional Engagement and Director of the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO) at SUNY New Paltz in 2008. CRREO is the principal locus of the college's efforts to raise its level of engagement within communities, governments, not-for-profits and businesses across the Hudson Valley. It seeks to conduct research on regional topics; encourage faculty to build regionally-based service activity into their scholarship and teaching; create and direct institutes and programs to meet regional needs; and offer conferences and programs on matters of regional interest.

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Hugh L. Brady

Director of the Legislative Lawyering Clinic, Univerisity of Texas School of Law

Hugh L. Brady is the founder and director of the Legislative Lawyering Clinic at The University of Texas School of Law, which teaches law students how to become effective legislative lawyers—lawyers who practice law in a political setting and ease the conflicts between law, politics, and policy by translating concepts between parties and negotiating the final, mutually-acceptable text. An acknowledged expert on the Texas legislative process, Brady is the author of Texas House Practice, which is considered one of the authoritative texts on Texas legislative procedure. As an Austin lawyer with a practice in legislative, administrative, and appellate law, Brady has provided advice on complicated legislative issues to Texas lawmakers of both parties and local officials. A graduate of Boston University School of Law, Brady is a member of the Education Committee of the Institute of Parliamentary and Political Law in Ottawa.

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Joshua J. Dyck

Joshua J. Dyck is a political scientist and election commentator. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Government in Politics from the University of Maryland and holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and Political Science from Western Washington University. He is currently an Associate Professor with tenure in the Political Science Department with a courtesy adjunct appointment in the Geography Department at the University at Buffalo, where he has been on the faculty since 2006. He also spent a year as a Dissertation Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California during the 2005-2006 academic year.

Professor Dyck studies American politics, with a focus on public opinion, voting behavior, and state politics. Much of his research is motivated by the interplay between public opinion and different social and institutional settings, examining the way that democratic citizens react to democratic environments and political institutions. His research has appeared in many leading scholarly journals including The Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and American Politics Research. He is also is the co-editor of The Guide to State Politics and Policy with Professor Richard Niemi of the University of Rochester, currently under contract with CQ Press.

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James A. Gardner

SUNY Distinguished Professor, Director, Jaeckle Center for State and Local Democracy

Jim Gardner received his B.A. from Yale in 1980 and his J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1984. From 1984 to 1988, he practiced law in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice, in Washington, D.C. Before joining the University at Buffalo faculty in 2001, he taught law at Western New England College, William and Mary, and the University of Connecticut. His research interests include the theoretical foundations of the constitutional structure of politics, the institutionalization through law of principles of democracy, constitutional structures of federalism, and subnational constitutional law.

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Keesha Gaskins

Senior Counsel, Democracy Program*, Brennan Center, NYU

Keesha Gaskins is Senior Counsel in the Brennan Center's Democracy Program. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Gaskins was Executive Director for the League of Women Voters Minnesota where she worked on a wide range of voting rights and civil rights issues. Ms. Gaskins is licensed in Minnesota, Massachusetts and the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota. She worked for many years as a special assistant appellate public defender for the State of Minnesota.

*Not admitted in New York

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Jim Greiner

Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Jim Greiner teaches courses on civil procedure, expert witnesses, and voting regulation. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School in 1995, Jim clerked for the Honorable Patrick E. Higginbotham on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, then spent six years practicing law in Washington, three for the United States Department of Justice, and three for Jenner & Block. He tried to focus his practice on employment discrimination, voting rights, and the Decennial Census, but alas, he also had to learn how airplanes get on and off aircraft carriers (in the A-12 litigation, originally filed in 1989 and still going), as well as how to deal with structural injunctions in long-running housing desegregation cases.

At the end of these six years, Jim entered the graduate program at the Department of Statistics at Harvard and emerged in 2007 with his Ph.D. His research focuses on the application of rigorous quantitative methods to legal issues, particularly to problems inside and surrounding adjudicative systems. His current projects include the development of quantitative methods useful for redistricting litigation, an investigation into the administration of voter ID laws, a series of randomized experiments designed to measure how much of a difference an offer of representation makes to indigent clients, and randomized evaluation of court-centered mediation programs. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such diverse venues as the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Association, the Annals of Applied Statistics, and Jurimetrics.

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Michael Halberstam

Associate Professor of Law, University at Buffalo Law School, SUNY

Michael Halberstam's research is in governance and institutional development. He received his J.D. at Stanford Law School and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University. He joins UB Law from Columbia Law School, where he was a fellow with the Center for Law and Economic Studies.

He practiced for several years with the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City, where he specialized in civil litigation in the state and federal courts in the fields of securities, banking, directors and officers' liability, bankruptcy, and other complex business disputes. His pro bono practice was in the area of voting rights. Before joining Paul, Weiss, he clerked for District Judge Thomas Griesa in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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J. Gerald ("Gerry") Hebert

Gerry is a sole practitioner in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in election law and redistricting. His legal practice is national in scope.

Gerry represents clients (including many local governments) in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, among other states. Over the last three decades, he has served as legal counsel for parties and amici curiae in numerous redistricting lawsuits, including several cases decided in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Gerry has authored a number of law journal articles and other publications on redistricting and the Voting Rights Act. His most recent publications include "Redistricting in the Post-2000 Era", in the George Mason University Law Review, and "The Realists' Guide to Redistricting", published by the American Bar Association's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice (co-authored).

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Ellen Katz

Professor, University of Michigan Law School

Professor Ellen D. Katz writes and teaches about election law, civil rights and remedies, and equal protection. Her scholarship addresses questions of minority representation, political equality, and the role of institutions in crafting and implementing anti-discrimination laws. Katz has published numerous articles including an influential empirical study of litigation under the Voting Rights Act. Prior to joining the Michigan faculty, Katz practiced as an attorney with the appellate sections of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division and its Environment and Natural Resources Division.

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Karin Mac Donald

Karen Mac Donald is the director of the Statewide Database, the redistricting database for the State of California, and the Election Administration Research Center at Berkeley Law, University of California, Berkeley. She is also the managing partner of Q2 Data & Research LLC, a small consulting firm specializing in redistricting, voting rights, census and election data, and election administration issues. Mac Donald has served as a consultant to many government, news, and nonprofit organizations, and worked as a redistricting consultant for various local and regional entities, including the redistricting commissions for City of San Diego and the County of San Fransisco. She participates on the Election Reapportionment Task Force of the National Conference of State Legislatures, and serves as faculty and speaker at NCSL redistricting seminars. She has served on a number of Census task forces involving planning for data collection, and geographic delineations of census boundaries, and was the State of California's liaison to the Census Bureau for the Block Boundary Suggestion Program and geography collection which she directed in 1998 and 2008 respectively.

Mac Donald has published and presented on topics ranging from voting rights and redistricting, to election administration and methods to involve the public in policy processes. Most recently, she has been training and working with California's Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Lynn Mather

Lynn Mather is a Professor of Law and Political Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She was director of the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, an endowed academic center for interdisciplinary research on law and legal institutions from 2002-2008. Before moving to UB Law School in 2002, Mather held the Nelson A. Rockefeller Chair in Government at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. While at Dartmouth, Mather served as department chair, acting director of the Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences and, in 1995, was awarded the Dartmouth College Distinguished Teaching Award.

A leading scholar in the field of law and society, Mather has published extensively on lawyers, legal professionalism, women in the legal profession, courts in popular culture, litigation against tobacco, trial courts and public policy, divorce mediation, plea bargaining, and the transformation of disputes. Her most recent book, Private Lawyers and the Public Interest: The Evolving Role of Pro Bono in the Legal Profession (2009), was co-edited with Robert Granfield and published by Oxford University Press. Her previous book (co-authored), Divorce Lawyers at Work: Varieties of Professionalism in Practice (2001) also published by Oxford, received the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book in the field of law and courts. Her earlier books include Empirical Theories About Courts (1983) and Plea Bargaining or Trial? The Process of Criminal-Case Disposition (1979).

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Laughlin McDonald

Laughlin McDonald received a BA degree from Columbia University and an LL.B from the University of Virginia. He has been director of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union in Atlanta, Georgia, since 1972. Prior to that he was in private practice and taught at the University of North Carolina Law School.

McDonald has represented minorities in scores of discrimination cases and specialized in the area of voting rights. He has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, numerous federal appellate courts, testified frequently before Congress, and written for scholarly and popular publications on a variety of civil liberties issues. He is the author of several books, including A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia and American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights.

Michael McDonald

Associate Professor of Government and Politics, George Mason University

Dr. Michael P. McDonald is Associate Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received his PhD in Political Science from University of California, San Diego and BS in Economics from California Institute of Technology. He held a one-year post-doc fellowship at Harvard University and has previously taught at Vanderbilt University and University of Illinois, Springfield.

His research interests include voting behavior, redistricting, Congress, American political development and political methodology. His voter turnout research shows that turnout is not declining, the ineligible population is rising. He is currently working on developing open-source redistricting software that is accessible through a Web browser.

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Costas Panagopoulos

Dr. Costas Panagopoulos is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He is also research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006. Dr. Panagopoulos previously founded and directed the Master's Program in Political Campaign Management in the Department of Politics at New York University. Dr. Panagopoulos, a leading expert on campaigns and elections, voting behavior, public opinion, and campaign finance, was part of the Decision Desk team at NBC News during the 2006 election cycle. A former candidate for the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1992, Dr. Panagopoulos also offers courses on campaign management and strategy, message development, and political communication.

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Rick Su

Associate Professor of Law, University at Buffalo Law School, SUNY

Rick Su graduated from Harvard Law School where he served as an Articles Editor for the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, he was a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Charles Hamilton Houston Fellow at Harvard Law School, and a law clerk in the legal honors program at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Su writes and teaches in the areas of Immigration and Local Government Law.

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Daniel Tokaji

Daniel Tokaji is a Professor of Law at The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law and Senior Fellow of Election Law @ Moritz. He was Visiting Professor of Law and Ralph E. Shikes Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School in the Fall 2008. Professor Tokaji's areas of expertise include election law, civil rights, and federal courts. His scholarship addresses questions of political equality, racial justice, and the role of the judiciary in democracy.

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Franita Tolson

Professor Tolson's scholarship focuses on the areas of constitutional law, election law, legal history and employment discrimination. Recently, she has focused on partisan gerrymandering and the First Amendment rights of political parties. She teaches courses in constitutional law and election law. Prior to joining the Florida State Law faculty, Professor Tolson was a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Before entering academia, she clerked for the Honorable Ann Claire Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the Honorable Ruben Castillo of the Northern District of Illinois. Professor Tolson was a member of the University of Chicago Law Review and won the Thomas Mulroy Prize for Oral Advocacy in the Hinton Moot Court Competition.

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Jeffrey M. Wice

Jeffrey M. Wice, serves as the redistricting counsel to the New York State Senate Minority Conference and is also "of counsel" to Washington, D.C.'s Sandler, Reiff, Young & Lamb, P.C., He has over 30 years of experience working in redistricting, voting rights and census law. He is considered a national expert on redistricting and has been included by ROLL CALL in its list of the top 50 Washington policy insiders.

Mr. Wice has assisted many state legislative leaders, Members of Congress, and other state and local government officials on redistricting and voting rights matters across the nation. During the 2000 decennial census, he was counsel to President Bill Clinton's members of the 2000 Census Monitoring Board. In New York State, he has been involved in three decades of congressional, state legislative and local government redistricting efforts. He has also taught election law at Hofstra and Touro Law Schools.

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Tamara S. Wright

Tamara S. Wright (University at Buffalo Law School '12) has worked in the areas of community development and in civic engagement and public policy. She has worked extensively with community-based groups and developed the City of Buffalo's 1st Citizens' Participation Academy, for which she received the African-American Award of Excellence. She has conducted research on grant opportunities, assisted with grant proposals for procurement of community development funds, and is a member of the Community Advisory Board for the Michigan St. African American Heritage Commission.