Cato University

Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and director of Cato University, the Institute’s educational arm. Palmer is also the executive vice president for international programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and is responsible for establishing operating programs in 14 languages and managing programs for a worldwide network of think tanks. Before joining Cato he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, and a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He frequently lectures in North America, Europe, Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, India, China and throughout Asia, and the Middle East on political science, public choice, civil society, and the moral, legal, and historical foundations of individual rights.

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Jeffrey A. Miron is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. His area of expertise is the economics of libertarianism, with particular emphasis on the economics of illegal drugs. Miron has served on the faculty at the University of Michigan and as a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management, M.I.T. and the Department of Economics, Harvard University. From 1992-1998, he was chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He is the author of Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition and The Economics of Seasonal Cycles. Miron received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Swarthmore College in 1979 and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1984.

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Robert McDonald is associate professor of history at the United States Military Academy and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his Ph.D. A specialist on Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic, he has published several essays and articles in journals such as The Historian, Southern Cultures, and the Journal of the Early Republic. He is editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point (University of Virginia Press, 2004) and Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming). He is completing a book to be titled Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Personality. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and Grace.

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Under the direction of Tim Lynch, Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice has become a leading voice in support of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties. His research interests include the war on terrorism, overcriminalization, the drug war, the militarization of police tactics, and gun control. In 2000, he served on the National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions. Lynch has also filed several amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court in cases involving constitutional rights. He is the editor of In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of the Criminal Law” and After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century. Lynch is a member of the Wisconsin, District of Columbia, and Supreme Court bars. He earned both a B.S. and a J.D. from Marquette University.

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David Boaz is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.

He is a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism. Boaz is the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. The earlier edition of The Libertarian Mind, titled Libertarianism: A Primer, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a well-researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.” His other books include The Politics of Freedom and the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

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Randy Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and contracts. After graduating from Northwestern University and Harvard Law School, he tried many felony cases as a prosecutor in the Cook County States’ Attorney’s Office in Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern and Harvard Law School. In 2008, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.

In 2004, Professor Barnett appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court to argue the medical cannabis case of Gonzalez v. Raich. He lectures internationally and appears frequently on radio and television programs such as the CBS Evening News, The News Hour (PBS), Talk of the Nation (NPR), Hannity & Colmes (FOX) and the Ricki Lake Show. He delivered the Kobe 2000 lectures in jurisprudence at the University of Tokyo and Doshisha University in Kyoto.

Professor Barnett’s scholarship includes more than eighty articles and reviews, as well as eight books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, 2004),Constitutional Law: Cases in Context (Aspen 2008), and Contracts Cases and Doctrine (Aspen, 4th ed. 2008).

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Christopher A. Preble is the vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He is the author of three books including The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous and Less Free (Cornell University Press, 2009); and John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); and he co-edited, with John Mueller, A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security (Cato Institute, 2014); and, with Jim Harper and Benjamin Friedman, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It (Cato Institute, 2010).

In addition to his work at Cato, Preble teaches the U.S. Foreign Policy elective at the University of California, Washington Center (UCDC). Before joining Cato in February 2003, he taught history at St. Cloud State University and Temple University. Preble was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, and served onboard USS Ticonderoga (CG-47) from 1990 to 1993. Preble holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University.

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George Selgin is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute. His research covers a broad range of topics within the field of monetary economics, including monetary history, macroeconomic theory, and the history of monetary thought. He is the author of The Theory of Free Banking (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order (Routledge, 1996), Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997), and, most recently, Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (University of Michigan Press, 2008). Selgin is one of the founders, along with Kevin Dowd and Lawrence H. White, of the Modern Free Banking School, which draws its inspiration from the writings of Friedrich Hayek on denationalization of money and choice in currency. He holds a B.A. in economics and zoology from Drew University, and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.

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John Tierney writes a column, Findings, for the Science section of The New York Times. He previously wrote the Big City column for the Times Magazine and the Metro section, the Political Points column for the Washington bureau, and an Op-Ed column.

He is the co-author, with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, of the New York Times best-seller, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Penguin Press, 2011). An excerpt, “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?”, ran in the Times Magazine. It was reviewed in the Times by Steven Pinker and named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011.

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Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, a national foundation based in the birthplace of President Coolidge. She is also the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man: Graphic, a full length illustrated version of the same book drawn by Paul Rivoche, Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americas Crazy.

Miss Shlaes is winner of the Hayek Prize and currently chairs the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy, and later chaired the jury for that prize. In 2003, she was JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy at the American Academy in Berlin.

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Judy Shelton is an economist with expertise in global finance and monetary issues. She is Co-Director of the Sound Money Project at Atlas Network. Author of Fixing the Dollar Now: Why US Money Lost Its Integrity and How We Can Restore It (2011), The Coming Soviet Crash (1989), Money Meltdown (1994) and “A Guide to Sound Money” (2010), her international economics articles have been published by The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Nihon Keizai Shimbun and El Economista. Dr. Shelton holds a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of Utah.

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