Tommy Thompson Center Events

Lee Epstein is the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on law and legal institutions, especially the behavior of judges.  

Professor Epstein is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In addition to her position at WashU, she holds Distinguished Visiting Professorships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Southern California, where she previously served as University Professor of Law & Political Science and as Hilliard Distinguished Professor of Law. She also is Principal Investigator of the U.S. Supreme Court Database and co-founding editor of the Journal of Law & Empirical Analysis.  

The recipient of 12 grants from the National Science Foundation, Professor Epstein has authored or edited 20 books and more than 160 articles and book chapters, many in collaboration with other scholars. She recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Judicial Behaviour (with Gunnar Grendstad, Urška Šadl, & Keren Weinshall) and is working on a new book, Free Speech: A Campus Toolkit. Her empirical research is frequently cited in the New York Times, among other media outlets.

Awards include the Pritchett Award for Best Book on Law and Courts and the Lasting Contribution Award for The Choices Justices Make (with Jack Knight) and for the article “Untangling the Causal Effect of Sex on Judging” (with Christina Boyd & Andrew D. Martin). She also received the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association for the Constitutional Law for a Changing America series (here, here, and here).

Professor Epstein teaches courses on constitutional law, judicial behavior, free speech, and the U.S. Supreme Court. She was named Outstanding First-Year Course Professor at Northwestern University School of Law. At Washington University, she received the Undergraduate Political Science Association’s Professor of the Year Award, the Student Union’s Faculty of the Year Award, the Alumni Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Award, and the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award.  

David Frum is a writer at The Atlantic and the author of the 2018 New York Times bestseller, TRUMPOCRACY: The Corruption of the American Republic, which was his ninth book. In 2001 and 2002, he served as special assistant and speechwriter to President George W. Bush during and after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Frum is a recognized intellectual leader of the American conservative movement.

His first book, DEAD RIGHT, was praised by William F. Buckley in 1994 as "the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation" and by Frank Rich in The New York Times as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative moment." His memoir of his service in the Bush White House, THE RIGHT MAN, was a New York Times bestseller in 2003.

Frum has served as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, as a trustee of the Republican Jewish Coalition, and as chairman of the board of trustees of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the United Kingdom. A native of Canada, he was a driving force in the "Winds of Change" movement that reunited that country's splintered Conservative party in the early 2000s. From 2009-2012, Frum created and edited the FrumForum group website devoted to the modernization of the Republican party. More than a dozen young writers who started their careers on Frum's site have gone on to success in politics and journalism.

Frum was one of the first and foremost conservative Republicans to sound the alarm about the challenge posed by the Trump presidency to US global leadership, open international trade, and democratic institutions. His prophetic 2017 cover story in the Atlantic, "How to Build an Autocracy," has been one of the most cited articles on Trump to date.

Frum appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC, and the Australian, British, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporations. A profile in Esquire in December 2017 described Frum as "first among equals" in the conservative anti-Trump movement.

Frum earned a BA and MA in history at Yale, then a JD at Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard chapter of the Federalist society. He taught history Yale in 1986-87.

Frum is married to Danielle Crittenden Frum, a journalist, author, and podcaster. They have three children and live in Washington DC and Wellington, Ontario.

Michelle Goldberg has been an opinion columnist at the New York Times since 2017. She was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on issues of workplace sexual harassment, and has also won two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for opinion/criticism and the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis.  

Her first book, “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism,” about religious authoritarianism in American politics, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. After that, she traveled to countries including India, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and Poland to write “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World,” a book about global battles over gender and reproductive rights, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Then, in a detour from politics, she wrote “The Goddess Pose,” a book about wellness culture and the long Western fascination with Eastern spirituality as refracted through the story of the peripatetic Russian yoga evangelist Indra Devi.  

Goldberg is an on-air contributor at MSNBC, and her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation and many others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.