FIRST LIBERTY'S CENTER FOR RELIGION, CULTURE & DEMOCRACY
Fixing the Federal Courts
A Symposium on the State of the Judiciary
October 1–2, 2026
AT&T Hotel and Conference Center (Zlotnik Ballroom)
1900 University Ave, Austin, TX 78705
Registration is Closed
Schedule
October 1
12:15 PM — Plenary Session #1: Professor Stephanie Barclay
Boxed lunches will be available to registered participants from 11:30 am until the start of Prof. Barclay’s presentation.
4:30 PM — Plenary Session #2: Professor Steve Smith
October 2
4:00 PM — Plenary Session #3: Professor John Yoo
Co-sponsored with the University of Texas at Austin Federalist Society and the University of Texas at Austin School of Civic Leadership.
Distinguished Speakers
PLENARY SESSION #1
Professor Stephanie Barclay
Stephanie Barclay is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, and the Faculty Co-Director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. Her work examines the relationship between constitutional rights and democratic governance, with particular emphasis on religious liberty, free speech, and the protection of minority communities. Barclay‘s work is published or is forthcoming in leading journals such as the Chicago Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, Harvard Law Review, the Journal of Law and Religion (Cambridge Univ. Press), the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum. Her forthcoming book, Constitutional Rights in a Democracy, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Her work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg BNA, The Hill, and Law 360. And her work has also been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Prior to joining Georgetown, Barclay was twice voted Professor of the Year. Barclay has also litigated constitutional cases at both the trial and appellate level, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. Barclay served as a law clerk to Judge N. Randy Smith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Barclay is a Faculty Affiliate at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School; and she is a Nootbaar Fellow at the Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics at Pepperdine University. She currently serves as the Chair for the AALS Law and Religion Section and as a Member of the Executive Committee for the AALS Constitutional Law Section. She graduated summa cum laude from BYU Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif. She is completing a Ph.D. in Law at Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar and a Tang Scholar.
PLENARY SESSION #2
Professor Steve Smith
Steven D. Smith, J.D. Yale 1979, B.A. BYU 1976, is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego, and Co-Director of that university’s Institute for Law and Religion. Before moving to San Diego, he was the Robert and Marion Short Professor at Notre Dame Law School and the Byron R. White Professor of Law at the University of Colorado.
Professor Smith’s first book, Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom (Oxford 1995), critically examines both the standard historical and normative accounts of religious freedom. This examination is continued in his most recent book, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom (Harvard 2014), which offers a “revised account” in contrast to the standard story of religious freedom in this country. Recently described as a kind of “conservative Crit,” Professor Smith has offered critical analyses of more general philosophical and jurisprudential themes in Law’s Quandary (Harvard 2004) and The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Harvard 2010).
PLENARY SESSION #3
Professor John Yoo
John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His work focuses on national security, constitutional law, international law, and the Supreme Court, and he regularly contributes to major editorial pages, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Yoo has served in all three branches of government. He was an official in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on national security and terrorism issues after the September 11 attacks; general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee; and a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals. He also supervises the Public Law and Policy Program, the Korea Law Center, and the California Constitution Center, and he is a recipient of the Federalist Society’s Paul M. Bator Award.
Register Here
More to Consider
Following controversies around the Supreme Court of the United States and lower federal courts over the last couple of years, legal scholars, commentators, and public officials have called for and proposed various reforms to the federal judiciary.
Behind those reform proposals is the assumption that the federal judiciary is broken. But is it? Are the federal courts deciding cases and controversies according to their design, adhering to law and equity, and consistent with the Constitution?
And if not, what fundamentally has gone wrong with adjudication in the federal courts? It seems important to ask those questions before attempting to fix anything.
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