Susan Benesch, Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, directs the Dangerous Speech Project. She has taught human rights and refugee law at Georgetown, Princeton, and American, among other universities. A human rights lawyer trained at Yale, she has also worked for the Center for Justice and Accountability, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First. Her interest in speech dates back to her first career as a journalist. Before law school, she was chief staff writer for the Miami Herald in Haiti, and reported from many Latin American countries for other publications.
Caroline Mala Corbin, Professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. Her scholarship focuses on the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses, particularly their intersection with equality issues. Widely published in law reviews, she is also a blogger and media commentator on First Amendment issues. Before coming to Miami she litigated civil rights cases as a pro bono fellow at Sullivan & Cromwell and as an attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. She clerked on the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. While at Columbia Law School she won the Pauline Berman Heller Prize and the James A. Elkins Prize for Constitutional Law.
W. Cole Durham, Jr. is the Susa Young Gates University Professor of Law and Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at the Brigham Young University Law School. He is President of the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies based in Milan, Italy, and a founding editor of the Oxford Journal for Law and Religion. He is the author (with Brett Scharffs) of Law and Religion: National, International and Comparative Perspectives (Wolters Kluwer 2010), and a co-editor of Facilitating Freedom of Religion or Belief: A Deskbook (Brill, 2004), and many other books and articles.
Frederick Mark Gedicks holds the Guy Anderson Chair at Brigham Young University Law School, where he teaches Jurisprudence and Constitutional Law. Professor Gedicks is widely published on law and religion, constitutional law, and constitutional interpretation. He has written extensively about the free exercise and anti-establishment questions raised by religious exemptions from the “contraception mandate” of the Affordable Care Act, and was principal author and counsel of record on an amicus brief filed by church/state scholars in support of the government in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014).
Nazila Ghanea is Associate Professor of International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford and serves is a member of the OSCE Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief. She serves on the Board of Governors of the Universal Rights Group, on the Editorial Board of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion and is an Associate of Oxford Human Rights Hub. She has authored and edited a number of academic and UN publications and is co-author, along with Heiner Bielefeldt and Michael Wiener, of a forthcoming Oxford University Press publication on freedom of religion or belief.
Dr. Nazila Ghanea is Associate Professor in International Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College (BA Keele, MA Leeds, PhD Keele, MA Oxon). She serves as a member of the OSCE Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief. was the founding editor of the international journal of Religion and Human Rights and now serves on its Editorial Board as well as the Advisory Board of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion. She has been a visiting academic at a number of institutions including Columbia and NYU, and previously taught at the University of London and Keele University, UK and in China. Nazila’s research spans freedom of religion or belief, the protection of identities in international human rights, and human rights in the Middle East. Her publications include nine books, five UN publications as well as a number of journal articles and reports. Nazila has acted as a human rights consultant/expert for a number of governments, the UN, UNESCO, OSCE, Commonwealth, Council of Europe and the EU. She has facilitated international human rights law training for a range of professional bodies around the world, lectured widely and carried out first hand human rights field research in a number of countries including Malaysia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. She is a regular contributor to the media on human rights matters.
Luke Goodrich is Deputy General Counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit law firm dedicated to protecting the freedom all religious traditions. He has argued and won precedent-setting cases in the Third, Fifth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. He represented the winning parties in three major Supreme Court cases: Holt v. Hobbs (2014), Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), and Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (2012). Before joining Becket, he advised the U.S. Department of State in its fight against human trafficking. He graduated from Wheaton College summa cum laude, and from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors.
Rosalind I.J. Hackett is Professor and Head, Department of Religious Studies, and adjunct in Anthropology, the University of Tennessee. She also taught and conducted research in Nigeria for eight years. She is an expert on religion in Africa, notably on new religious movements, and religion and conflict. Her latest (co-edited) books are Displacing the State: Religion and Conflict in Neoliberal Africa (2012) and New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (2015). She is a past President of the International Association for the History of Religions and is co-founder/co-coordinator of the Gulu Study and Service Abroad Program in northern Uganda. She is also on the Steering Committee of the African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies.
Katherine Marshall has worked for over four decades on international development, focusing on the world’s poorest countries. A senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and Professor of the Practice of Religion, Development, and Practice in the School of Foreign Service, she is the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, a non-governmental organization whose mission is to bridge gulfs that separate the worlds of development and religion. During a long career at the World Bank she held leadership assignments on Africa, Latin America, and East Asia and on values, ethics, and religion.
Nokuzola Mndende. Director, Icamagu Institute. Received PhD in Religious Studies. Over the course of her career has served as Deputy Chairperson, Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims and President of Icamagu Spirituality, a national organization for African Traditional Religion (ATR) in South Africa. She has also worked as a freelance presenter of the ATR at Umhlobo Wenene, the second largest radio station of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Dr. Mndende is a lecturer on ATR and a consultant on all issues regarding religion in Africa.
A. Rashied Omar is a Research Scholar of Islamic Studies and Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on the roots of religious violence, the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding, and Islamic ethics of war and peace and interreligious dialogue. Omar also serves as Imam at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town. He served as co-chair of the 1999 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, and is an emeritus trustee of the Parliament’s Council.
Brett G. Scharffs is Francis R. Kirkham Professor of Law, and Director of the International Center for Law and Religions Studies at Brigham Young University Law School. He was a Rhodes Scholar (Oxford University); Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal (Yale Law School); Visiting Professor at the Adelaide School of Law and at Central European University in Budapest. He has authored over 100 articles and book chapters and made over 300 scholarly presentations in over 30 countries. Publications include Law and Religion: National, International and Comparative Perspectives (with W. Cole Durham) and Law and Religion in the USA (with Elizabeth Clark).
Jeroen Temperman is Associate Professor of Public International Law at the Department of International Law of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research is focused on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression and extreme speech (particularly religious hate speech), religion-state relationships, and issues of discrimination on religious grounds. He was a Fulbright Scholar, visiting at Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C. in 2014-15. He is Editor-in-Chief of Religion and Human Rights, an international law journal. His book on the prohibition of advocacy of religious hatred in domestic and international law is being published by Cambridge University Press.
Marco Ventura is a full professor in law and religion at the Law Department of the University of Siena (Italy). After a PhD at the University of Strasbourg, he visited the universities of London (UCL), Oxford, Strasbourg, Brussels (ULB), the Indian Law Institute in Delhi, the University of Cape Town, and Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. From 2012 to 2015 he was a professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His last book is From Your Gods to Our Gods. A History of Religion in British, Indian and South African Courts (2014). From 2013 to 2015 he visited Vietnam as an expert in the dialogue between the European Union and the Vietnamese Committee on Religious Affairs.
Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law and Director of the Family Law and Policy Program at the University of Illinois College of Law. She has authored seven books, including Reconceiving the Family: Critical Reflections on the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (Cambridge University Press); and Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty (with Douglas Laycock and Anthony Picarello, eds.). A member of the American Law Institute, her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and on Good Morning America, among others.