Our Founders

Seth C. Oranburg is a Professor of Law at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law and Co-Director of its Law and Entrepreneurship Program. His research asks how law creates and destroys governance in organizations, markets, and civil society. Professor Oranburg writes about business organizations, financial technology, and the regulation of digital assets. His monograph, A history of Financiay Technology and Regulation(Cambridge University Press), argues that America needs new regulatory strategies for an era of decentralized finance and distributed governance.

The same governance question drives Professor Oranburg’s work on religious liberty and Jewish civil rights. He testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in February 2026 on antisemitism at American colleges and universities, chairs the Law Faculty Section of the Academic Engagement Network, leads scholarly initiatives at the Center for Jewish Legal Studies, and serves on the steering committee of the Law and Antisemitism Conference. Under a Touro University Fellowship, he built an undergraduate course on how a community with no final authority over the meaning of its law still acts as one community. Writing in Public Discourse, he read Magnifica Humanitas alongside the Jewish law of the golem to ask what duties the makers of autonomous systems owe the people those systems govern.

Anat Alon-Beck’s research focuses on corporate law and governance. Her work examines how legal and regulatory structures influence the shift in equities from public markets to private markets, and the rise in the number of “unicorn” firms, which are privately held venture-capital backed startups that are valued at $1 billion or more. She hopes to develop a novel, comprehensive framework within which a deeper understanding of market contracting, regulatory changes, and policy surrounding unicorn firms can be achieved. Her research on these issues is frequently cited by policymakers, judges, leading scholars in the corporate law and finance fields. It was cited to US Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Professor Alon-Beck also focuses on corporate governance, responsible and sustainable business models, operations and investments and new social paradigms. She wants her students to be able to recognize the exciting potential for business law to create multiple forms of value for all stakeholders, including society at large. She is passionate about empowering women to advance in entrepreneurship and leadership positions in the business world.

Professor Alon-Beck joined the faculty of Case Western Reserve from New York University School of Law, where she served as the Jacobson Fellow in Law and Business. Prior to NYU, she was a visiting assistant professor of International Business and Management at Dickinson College. Professor Alon-Beck holds JSD and LLM degrees, with honors, from Cornell Law School, where she served as an editor of the Cornell International Law Journal. She received her LLB from Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law and served as an editor of Theoretical Inquiries in Law.

Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. She graduated from Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and has a graduate degree in Jewish Studies. Kwall, an internationally renowned scholar and lecturer, has written about Jewish law and culture, authorship rights, creativity theory, intellectual property, and women’s issues. She is one of the leading voices on American Jewry and the author of Polarized (2026), Remix Judaism (2020), and The Myth of the Cultural Jew (2015). She is also a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law (2025). Kwall is a frequent visiting professor at Reichman’s Radzyner Law School in Israel. Her popular writings have appeared in The Free Press, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, and many of the Jewish themed media.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. David E. Bernstein holds a University Professorship chair at the Antonin Scalia Law School, where he has been teaching since 1995. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, William & Mary, Brooklyn Law School, the University of Turin, and Hebrew University. Professor Bernstein teaches Constitutional Law, Evidence, and Products Liability.

A prolific author, Professor Bernstein often challenges the conventional wisdom with prodigious research and sharp, original analysis. He is the author of five books, and coauthor of two more. Professor Bernstein’s book Rehabilitating Lochner was praised across the political spectrum as “intellectual history in its highest form,” a “fresh perspective and a cogent analysis,” “delightful and informative,” “sharp and iconoclastic,” and “a terrific work of historical revisionism.” Columnist George Will praised Bernstein’s most recent book, Classified, The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America, as “perhaps the most consequential American book of 2022.”

Professor Bernstein has also written dozens of articles and essays published in major law reviews, including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. An article he coauthored, Defending Daubert: It’s Time to Amend Federal Rule of Evidence directly inspired a pending amendment to Rule 702.

Professor Bernstein blogs at the Instapundit.com the Times of Israel, and the Volokh Conspiracy. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and a John M. Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy.

Jon Michaels is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Advisor to the Dean on Civic Engagement. His scholarly and teaching interests include constitutional law, administrative law, national security law, bureaucracy, privatization, and political extremism, antisemitism, and political violence. Jon is a graduate of Williams College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He clerked first for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. A life member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute, Jon has written essays and op-eds for the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Tablet, Forward, Foreign Affairs, Time Magazine, American Prospect, and Guardian. His scholarly articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, NYU Law Review, Virginia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal, among others. Jon’s 2017 book, Constitutional Coup, was published by Harvard University Press. Simon & Schuster/One Signal published his second book, titled Vigilante Nation, in 2024. He is currently completing work on a third,The Semi-United States, which Oxford University Press will publish in 2027.

Michael Bazyler is professor of law and The 1939 Law Scholar in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies. He is holder of previous fellowships at Harvard Law School and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In fall 2006, he was a Research Fellow at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority of Israel) and the holder of the Baron Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim Chair for the Study of Racism, Antisemitism and the Holocaust. Before joining Chapman in 2008, he was a professor for 25 years at Whittier Law School. He received his B.A. from UCLA and his JD from USC.

Noa Tal is a technology lawyer and proud Israeli-American living in the heart of Silicon Valley with her husband and three beautiful children. She is a passionate defender of Jewish values and their fundamental importance to Western Civilization, starting with the most important one: the infinite worth of each human being and his God-given right to live freely and with purpose.

Professor Steven Solomon is one of the nation’s most well known authorities on corporate law. His research focuses on the intersection of law and finance with a particular focus on corporate law and governance, mergers and acquisitions, disclosure practices and procedures and capital markets. He is the author of one of the leading casebooks on mergers and acquisitions., Of the 400+ articles that are published each year by scholars in the field, seven of his law review articles have been selected as being among the “top ten” articles published in corporate and securities law in their respective years. He has also published in leading peer-reviewed finance and economic journals, such as the Journal of Financial Economics and the American Law & Economics Review. According to the Sisk Report, he is among the top ten cited corporate and securities law professors, among both law professors and law professors at Berkeley. Professor Solomon has been active in areas of antisemitism and the law, teaching a course on the topic at both the law school and undergraduate level. He has also advised the DOJ antisemitism Task Force.

Professor Ofer Raban received his B.A. from the City College of New York, his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University (where he was the recipient of the Oxford University Law Faculty Award). Professor Raban worked as a prosecutor in New York before joining academia. He taught law, inter alia, at the University of Oxford and the University of Utah before joining the University of Oregon. His principal research interests are constitutional law, legal philosophy, and criminal law, and he teaches Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence, Criminal Investigation, Criminal Law, and an LLM seminar. He is the author of two books on legal philosophy, and of numerous law review articles dealing with constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, and legal theory. His work has been cited by federal courts, and has been translated into Chinese, Polish, Korean, Turkish, and Hebrew. Professor Raban lectures extensively both locally and internationally.

Mark Cohen is a writer and a very part-time lawyer. His current academic research is on how Zionism influenced early American Black Power movements, antizionism within contemporary American Black Power movements, and the role of intersectionality and critical race theory in antizionism and antisemitism. Mark’s short story “Hamsa” was recently published in Judith Magazine. In 2018, his nonfiction story “Neighborhood Ghosts” won the Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival’s award for Best Nonfiction Story About Brooklyn. Mark regularly publishes on the Times of Israel blog and on Substack under the name “The Red Heifer.” He is also a member of Nellie Neeman-Bochner’s Jerusalem Writers Group.

Richard Ross is the David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Illinois (Urbana/Champaign). He has co-edited, with Brian Owensby, Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (NYU Press, 2018); and co-edited, with Lauren Benton, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (NYU Press, 2013). He is currently working on two book manuscripts: with Jane Ohlmeyer and Philip Stern, Making an English Legal World: Anglicization in the British Empire, 1540–1800 (under contract, Oxford University Press); and with Steven Wilf: The Early American Rule of Law: A Comparative History (under contract, Yale University Press). Ross is the founder and director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History, which organizes a conference every several years at the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Marcelo Rodríguez works as the Associate Librarian for Comparative and International Law as well CS-Professor of Legal Research at the University of Arizona Law School in Tucson, Arizona. Previously, he was the Research and Outreach Librarian at the U.S. Courts for the Second Circuit and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In the past, he has also worked at Columbia Law Library as well as in different capacities at the Central Library of the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium; the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands; and the Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He is an active member of both the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL). Born in Puerto Rico, he speaks Spanish and French fluently as well as reading knowledge in Hebrew and German.

Joshua J. Freundel is an attorney in Cambridge, MA. Most recently, he was a research fellow at Harvard Law School. His work focuses on religious free exercise and federal antidiscrimination, as well as general Jewish law and thought. His two most recent papers are Confronting Religious Exercise and Grok After Groff: AI and Religious Exemptions, both under submission review. Joshua graduated from Harvard Law School in 2022.

Liron Matalon is a Law student at Tel Aviv University specializing in international law. He previously served as a Media Advisor at the Office of the President of Israel, H.E. Isaac Herzog, where he contributed to strategic communication and public policy. Prior to this role, Liron was a military journalist for Israel’s national public radio, covering the October 7th war. His academic background includes a Research Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law school and a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He also served as an Emissary of the Jewish Agency for Israel in New York City.

Gerald M. Steinberg is professor emeritus of political studies and founder of the Program on Conflict and Negotiation, Bar Ilan University. He heads the NGO Monitor project in Jerusalem. His publications include “Applying the IHRA Working Definition to the UN and Human Rights NGOs” in Contending with Antisemitism in a Rapidly Changing Political Climate, "Menachem Begin and the Israel–Egypt Peace Process: Between Ideology and Political Realism," and “The Palestinization of Human Rights: Al-Haq and HRW as Templates,” He received the Bernard Lewis Prize from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (2025).

Jeffrey Lax is a Professor of Law at the City University of New York and founder of S.A.F.E. Campus, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to combating antisemitism on college campuses. He is a frequent legal and political commentator on Fox News, Newsmax, NewsNation, and other national media outlets, and the author of numerous op-eds and papers on Jewish civil rights and campus antisemitism. His paper,

Who Are the Jewish People, Really? PRIZE and the First-Ever Mapping of Five Authentic Dimensions of Jewish Identity Under American Law, will be published in the September issue of Commentary Magazine.

Adv. Avraham Russell Shalev is the director of the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University in Canada, and a Bachelor of Law, and Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Bar-Ilan University.