The Buckley Institute presents
Jennifer Mascott, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Separation of Powers Institute at Catholic Law and Michael P. Moreland, University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy, Villanova University:
“Supreme Court Review: Abortion Pills, Trump on Trial & Curbing the Bureaucracy.”
Join the Buckley Institute for our annual event reviewing the most recent term of the United States Supreme Court. The panel will cover recent rulings on mifepristone, presidential immunity, and the principle of deferring to regulatory agencies known as the Chevron Doctrine.
For this year’s panel, we are excited to welcome Catholic University Columbus School of Law Associate Professor of Law Jennifer Mascott and Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law Professor of Law and Religion Michael Moreland.
Professor Mascott writes in the areas of administrative and constitutional law, theories of constitutional and statutory interpretation, and the constitutional structural separation of powers. She also serves as a Supreme Court contributor for NBC Universal. Her scholarship has been cited extensively by the Supreme Court and federal circuit and district courts and has been published or is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Supreme Court Review by the University of Chicago Press, the George Washington Law Review, the BYU Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and the George Mason Law Review, among other journals.
Professor Mascott joins Catholic Law from George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School where she was an Assistant Professor of Law and Co-Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center. In 2022, Professor Mascott joined as coauthor for the 9th edition of Beermann/Cass/Diver’s Administrative Law: Cases and Materials. The well-known Legal Theory Blog has reviewed Professor Mascott’s work as “path breaking” and in 2023, Professor Mascott received the Justice Joseph Story Award given annually to a young academic for excellence in scholarship, concern for students, and commitment to teaching in a manner that advances the rule of law.
In 2019, Professor Mascott took a leave of absence from teaching to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel within the U.S. Department of Justice. In May 2020, she was appointed Associate Deputy Attorney General and starting in November 2020, served in a double appointment as both ADAG and a deputy in OLC through January 2021. Separate from her formal responsibilities in those two roles, Professor Mascott assisted with aspects of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation process and argued cases in federal appellate and trial courts during her government service. Professor Mascott is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and to then-Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, formerly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Professor Mascott graduated summa cum laude from the George Washington University Law School, where she earned the highest cumulative graduating GPA on record at the law school.
Michael P. Moreland is University Professor of Law and Religion and Director of the Eleanor H. McCullen Center for Law, Religion and Public Policy at Villanova University. Professor Moreland joined the Villanova faculty in 2006 and served as Vice Dean from 2012 to 2015. His research is primarily in the areas of torts, law and religion, bioethics, and constitutional law, and he regularly teaches Torts, Constitutional Law, seminars in law and religion, and undergraduate courses in ethics.
Professor Moreland is the co-editor of Christianity and Private Law (Routledge, 2021) and has published articles in leading legal, public policy, and bioethics journals.
Professor Moreland was a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture from 2015 to 2017. He was the Forbes Visiting Fellow at Princeton University in the James Madison Program during academic year 2010-11.
Professor Moreland received his BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, his MA and PhD in theological ethics from Boston College, and his JD from the University of Michigan Law School. Following law school, he clerked for the Honorable Paul J. Kelly Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and was an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC. Before coming to Villanova, he served as Associate Director for Domestic Policy at the White House under President George W. Bush.