Our Team
FACULTY CHAIR
Professor Neal Katyal
Neal Katyal is the Faculty Chair of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection as well as the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown University.
He has served as Acting Solicitor General of the United States, where he argued several major Supreme Court cases involving a variety of issues, such as his successful defense of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, his victorious defense of former Attorney General John Ashcroft for alleged abuses in the war on terror, his unanimous victory against eight states who sued the nation’s leading power plants for contributing to global warming, and a variety of other matters.
As Acting Solicitor General, Katyal was responsible for representing the federal government of the United States in all appellate matters before the U.S. Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals throughout the nation. Katyal previously served as National Security Adviser in the U.S. Justice Department and was commissioned by President Clinton to write a report on the need for more legal pro bono work.
He also served as Vice President Al Gore’s co-counsel in the Supreme Court election dispute of 2000, and represented the deans of most major private law schools in the landmark University of Michigan affirmative-action case Grutter v. Bollinger (2003). Katyal clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer as well as Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He attended Dartmouth College and Yale Law School. His articles have appeared in virtually every major law review and newspaper in America.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Professor Joshua A. Geltzer
Joshua Geltzer serves as the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection as well as Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is also an ASU Future of War Fellow at New America.
Geltzer served from 2015 to 2017 as Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council staff, having served previously as Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council and as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court and, before that, as a law clerk to Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Geltzer received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and his PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Before that, he attended Princeton University, majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
He is the author of US Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signalling and the Terrorist World-View, published by Routledge; and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Parameters, Politico, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, the Journal of Constitutional Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, and the Washington Post.
SENIOR LITIGATORS
Professor Mary B. McCord
Mary McCord serves as Senior Litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection as well as Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. McCord was the Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2016 to 2017 and served as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division (NSD) from 2014 to 2016.
Joining NSD put McCord in charge of the Division’s nearly 400 employees, who collectively are tasked with carrying out the counterterrorism, counterespionage, and counterintelligence functions of the Justice Department. In her post, McCord interacted with the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country.
Previously, McCord worked for nearly twenty years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Among other positions, she served as a Deputy Chief in the Appellate Division, overseeing and arguing hundreds of cases in the U.S. and District of Columbia Courts of Appeals.
She also served as the Criminal Division Chief, where she oversaw all criminal prosecutions in federal district court. McCord graduated from Georgetown University Law School and subsequently served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas Hogan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Professor Douglas N. Letter
Douglas Letter serves as Senior Litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, as well as Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.
Letter was the Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2012 to 2018, and had been a litigator on the Appellate Staff since 1978 (following his graduation from the University of California – Berkeley School of Law). As the Director of the Appellate Staff, Letter supervised 60 attorneys responsible for representing the interests of the United States in many of the most important appellate cases around the United States. Appellate Staff lawyers appear in all of the U.S. Courts of Appeals and in various state supreme courts, and work very closely with the Office of the Solicitor General in presenting cases for the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court (where the Civil Division generally is involved in about 30 percent of the Supreme Court’s cases decided on the merits).
During his 40 years with the Civil Division, Letter presented oral argument for the United States over 200 times in the federal Circuit Courts as well as in numerous federal district courts (and appeared in the Supreme Court). His primary areas of expertise included litigation involving national security matters, including use of the State Secrets privilege and other means of protecting highly classified information, as well as slowing the flow of money for international terrorism; cases concerning the foreign relations of the United States; constitutional disputes involving separation of powers principles, Executive power, and First Amendment speech and Due Process Clause issues; criminal and civil enforcement of federal consumer protection laws; recovery under the False Claims Act of funds fraudulently taken from the public fisc; Freedom of Information Act claims; and general administrative law issues. While at the Justice Department, Letter received numerous awards recognizing his work from Attorneys General, and various federal agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Food and Drug Administration, as well as the Federal Bar Association’s Justice Tom Clark Outstanding Government Lawyer Award.
As a career public servant, Letter served details as Associate Counsel to President Clinton in the White House Counsel’s Office, as Deputy Associate Attorney General for Attorney General Janet Reno, and as Senior Counselor to Attorney General Eric Holder. Letter was elected to two terms on the D.C. Bar Board of Governors, served many years as the Solicitor General’s representative on the Judicial Conference’s committee recommending amendments to the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, and served on the Board of the D.C. Circuit Historical Society. He taught a course on national security law at George Washington University Law School for 14 years, and has lectured extensively at various law schools and D.C. Bar sessions on litigation advocacy skills and the special role and ethics of government attorneys.
LITIGATORS
Amy Marshak
Amy Marshak is a Litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Immediately prior to joining the Institute, Marshak was an attorney with the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she engaged in policy and appellate work and served as counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security. She previously served as a law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York. She also worked as an attorney and intelligence analyst in the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department.
Marshak graduated summa cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she was a senior executive editor of the NYU Law Review and was awarded the University Graduation Prize. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University.
Nicolas Riley
Nicolas Riley is a Litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Before joining the Institute, he served on the Civil Appellate Staff of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he represented government agencies and officials in appellate courts around the country. He previously served as a law clerk to Judge Sidney R. Thomas of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California. Before clerking, he was a voting-rights attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Nic received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he directed the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
* Admitted only in New York. Practice supervised by D.C. Bar members pursuant to D.C. Court of Appeals Rule 49(c)(8).
Seth Wayne
Seth Wayne is a Litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Before joining the Institute, he was a trial attorney in the Special Litigation Section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, where he investigated and litigated cases involving law enforcement agencies engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations. Prior to joining the Department of Justice, he was a Liman Public Interest Fellow and staff attorney at the Orleans Public Defenders, where he represented indigent people charged with crimes in the New Orleans Criminal District Court, with a focus on people with lived experience of mental illness.
Seth received his law degree from Yale Law School, where he was student director of the Criminal Defense Project and a director of the Rebellious Lawyering Conference. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in Canada.
Associates
Jonathan Backer
Jonathan Backer is an Associate at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Before joining the Institute, Jonathan served as a law clerk to Judge Ronald Lee Gilman of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Judge Paul W. Grimm of the District of Maryland. He also served as a foreign law clerk to Justice Miriam Naor, President of the Supreme Court of Israel. Prior to law school, Jonathan researched campaign-finance and Senate Rules reform at the Brennan Center for Justice and served as a legislative assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.
Jonathan graduated magna cum laude from Michigan Law School and summa cum laude from Columbia University. During law school, he served as an Articles Editor for the Michigan Law Review.
* Admitted only in New York. Practice supervised by D.C. Bar members pursuant to D.C. Court of Appeals Rule 49(c)(8).
Robert Friedman
Robert Friedman is an Associate at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Immediately prior to joining ICAP, he served as the Relman Civil Rights Fellow at Relman, Dane & Colfax. Robert previously clerked for Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York as well as practiced as an associate at a law firm in New York City.
Robert received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he was a comments editor on the Law Review, and his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College.
Daniel Rice
Daniel Rice serves as an Associate at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Daniel previously served as a law clerk to the Honorable Sri Srinivasan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the Honorable Christopher R. Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Daniel graduated summa cum laude from the Duke University School of Law, where he served as an Executive Editor of the Duke Law Journal and won the Constitutional Law and Civil Rights Award. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arkansas. Daniel’s work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in the Virginia Law Review, the Harvard Journal on Legislation, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and the Duke Law Journal.
Administrative Assistant
Jonathan de Jong
Jonathan de Jong is the Administrative Assistant at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. Immediately prior to joining ICAP, he worked in the Office of Enrollment at the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies.
He previously worked as a litigation paralegal at Covington & Burling LLP and as an English teacher in Vietnam with Princeton in Asia.
Jonathan is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.