Group: Event Speakers GTW

Consovoy McCarthy PLLC; previously Judicial Law Clerk, Justice Clarence Thomas

Mr. Proctor assists clients with a variety of litigation and appellate matters that encompass constitutional law, administrative law, and commercial litigation.

Mr. Proctor is a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court, Judge Gregory Katsas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Joan Larsen of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He earned his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in Classics cum laude from Yale University.

He is a member of the District of Columbia and Georgia Bars.*

*Supervised by principals of the firm who are members of the Virginia Bar.

Senior Fellow; Academic Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition, University of Pennsylvania, Penn Carey Law

Dr. Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at the George Washington University Law School. She is an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. Her areas of expertise also include family law, criminal law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, and Second Amendment law. Dr. Franks is the author of two books: Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment (Bold Type Books, 2024) and The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech (Stanford Press, 2019). Her scholarship has also appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the California Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review, among others. She a Fellow with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, and a member of the American Law Institute. She is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court and the District of Columbia.

Dr. Franks is also the President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination. In 2013, she drafted the first model criminal statute on the nonconsensual distribution of intimate imagery (NCII, sometimes referred to as “revenge porn”), which has served as the template for multiple state laws and for pending federal legislation. She served as the reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s 2018 Uniform Civil Remedies for the Unauthorized Disclosure of Intimate Images Act and frequently advises state and federal legislators on various forms of technology-facilitated abuse. Dr. Franks also advises major technology platforms on privacy, free expression, and safety issues.

Prior to joining the GW faculty, Dr. Franks was the Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law and an Affiliated Faculty member of the University of Miami Department of Philosophy. She previously taught at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law and at Harvard University as a lecturer in social studies and philosophy. She holds a JD from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Co-Director NetChoice Litigation Center

Paul Taske is the co-director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. As co-director, Taske is responsible for overseeing NetChoice’s active litigation on issues ranging from age-verification and content moderation to compelled speech and digital marketplace regulation. Taske also manages NetChoice’s amicus portfolio. Before joining NetChoice, Taske served as Administrative Attorney to Justice R. Patrick DeWine of the Supreme Court of Ohio. Taske earned his J.D. from the University of Cincinnati College of Law and his B.B.A. from Eastern Michigan University.

Lead Counsel, Tech Policy, FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression)

Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, University of Akron School of Law 

Jess Miers is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Akron School of Law. As a professor, lawyer, and technologist, Jess primarily focuses on the intersection of law and the Internet. She is widely considered an expert on U.S. intermediary liability law and has written, spoken, and taught extensively about topics such as speech and Section 230, content moderation, intellectual property, and cyber crime.

Before law school, Jess received her Bachelor’s in Computer Science from George Mason University. She spent four years as a Software Engineer for a defense contractor in Northern Virginia. Throughout law school, Jess interned at Twitter, TechFreedom, The UCLA Technology Law and Policy Institute, and Google Trust & Safety. She founded the SCU Internet Law Student Organization, with the goal of encouraging students to explore and pursue careers in Internet law and policy.

Visiting Associate Professor, Georgetown University McDonough School of Business; Chief Scientist, Foundation

Dr. Jones is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Operations Department at the McDonough School of Business, affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and an Entrepreneur . He has nearly 20 years of experience in statistics, econometrics, and machine learning, with a career spanning academia, industry, and government. His work bridges traditional statistical methods with modern machine learning, focusing on interpretability, predictive modeling, and applications in economics and business.

Dr. Jones’s research explores advanced methods and metrics for statistical machine learning, such as transfer learning with Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a generalized R-squared for classification and multivariate prediction, as well as methods for deriving approximate marginal effects in complex predictive models. He has authored and maintains multiple open-source software packages and published on statistical computing, machine learning, and applied analytics.

He holds a Ph.D. in Computational Science and Informatics from George Mason University, an M.S. in Mathematics and Statistics from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in Economics from the College of William and Mary. Outside of work, he is a Marine Corps veteran and enjoys boxing.

Staff Technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Lena Cohen is a Staff Technologist at EFF who works on Privacy Badger—a free browser extension used by over three million people to stop companies from spying on them online. Lena also supports EFF’s work on commercial surveillance, the data broker industry, and consumer privacy. Lena holds a degree in Computer Science and Science, Technology, and Society from Brown University.