Join Students For Liberty at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ on Saturday, October 20 for the 2012 Students For Liberty Arizona Regional Conference. Arizona State is home to one of the strongest pro-liberty student groups in the country and the conference will bring together students not only from ASU but from all over the southwest for an incredible event.
- Where: Arizona State University
- Host: Arizona State University Students for Liberty
- Location 9:00am – 5:30pm: SCHWADA
- Location 5:45pm – 8:45pm: Memorial Union
- When: October 20, 2012
- Conference: 9am – 8pm
- Social: 9pm – 11pm at The Vine
- Cost: FREE of Charge
Morning Keynote – Matt Welch, Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine
Matt Welch is editor in chief of Reason, the libertarian magazine of “Free Minds and Free Markets.” He is co-author, along with Nick Gillespie, of the 2011 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, which Tyler Cowen called ”the up-to-date statement of libertarianism.”
Reason has been a Western Publications Association magazine of the year finalist every year under Welch’s leadership, winning three total first-place Maggie awards, as well as another six first-place notices from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Welch himself has won a half-dozen first-place L.A. Press Club awards over the years, for work ranging from coverage of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, to reportage on Cuban baseball players, to essays of and about media criticism.
Before assuming editorship of Reason in 2008, Welch worked as an assistant editorial pages editor for the Los Angeles Times, as a media columnist for Reason, California correspondent for The National Post, political columnist for WorkingForChange.com, and regular contributor to the Online Journalism Review. Before 1998, he lived for eight years in Central Europe, where he co-founded the region’s first post-communist English-language newspaper, Prognosis, worked as UPI’s Slovakia correspondent and managed the Budapest Business Journal.
Evening Keynote – Yaron Brook, President Ayn Rand Institute
Yaron Brook is president of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. He is a columnist at Forbes.com, and his articles have been featured in major publications such as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Investor’s Business Daily. He is co-author of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea and a contributor to Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, is an internationally sought after speaker on such topics as the causes of the financial crisis, the morality of capitalism, and U.S. foreign policy.
Dr. Brook was born and raised in Israel. He served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence and earned a BSc in civil engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. In 1987 he moved to the United States, where he received his MBA and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin; he became an American citizen in 2003. For seven years he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, and in 1998 he cofounded a financial advisory firm, BH Equity Research, of which he is presently managing director and chairman.
Clint Bolick – Goldwater Institute
Clint Bolick serves as the Goldwater Institute’s Vice President for Litigation. In a recent profile, the New York Times said that Bolick is “known for his aggressive litigation to defend individual liberties.” He has argued and won cases in the United States Supreme Court, the Arizona Supreme Court, and state and federal courts from coast to coast. He has won landmark precedents defending school choice, freedom of enterprise, and private property rights and challenging corporate subsidies and racial classifications.
Professor Michael Thomas
Institute for Humane Studies Speaker Series
Michael D. Thomas is a public choice economist who earned a PhD in economics from George Mason university in 2009. He has also studied at Duke University while a fellow at the History of Political Economy Center in 2008-2009. Michael has published papers in the Journal of City and Town Management, the Review of Austrian Economics, and the Journal of Private Enterprise. He is currently working as an Research Professor at Utah State University, studying transportation economics, regulation policy, and welfare economics. His wife, Diana W. Thomas is an assistant professor of economics. Michael’s interest in monetary economics was stimulated while earning a Masters degree at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and while selling mortgage loans during 2001-2003 as a loan originator. Michael received his bachelors degree from the University of Alabama in 2001 and is an avid college football fan.
Trevor Burrus – Cato Institute
Institute for Humane Studies Speaker Series
Trevor Burrus is a legal associate at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, and legal history. His work has appeared in the Vermont Law Review, the Syracuse Law Review, the Jurist, as well as the Washington Times,Huffington Post, the Daily Caller, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and USA Today. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
Robert Anthony Peters
Robert Anthony Peters is an actor, producer and director. In 2001, he completed his BS at the University of Arizona in Marketing and Entrepreneurship, was a Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow in DC, and trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in NYC. A few of his films available to the public are The Pursuit of Happyness, Revolution Summer, The Village Barbershop, and Wasted. Recently, he starred in the webseries pilot, DADS, a radio spot for US Cellular, and two web commercials for HP. He is president of Laissez Faire Media and the Culture of Liberty Institute and a begrudging member of SAG-AFTRA.
Tom Jenney – Arizona Americans for Prosperity
Tom Jenney is director of the Arizona chapter of Americans for Prosperity, formerly the Arizona Federation of Taxpayers. As director of AFT in 2006, Jenney helped to reduce state income and property taxes, and helped lead the fight to pass Prop 207, the Private Property Rights Protection Act. Since joining Americans for Prosperity in 2007, Jenney has won multiple legislative and local government victories on tax policy, privatization, budget reform and worker freedom. Most recently, in November 2010, Jenney and AFP-Arizona were helpful in passing Prop 106, the Arizona Health Care Freedom Act, and Prop 113, the Save Our Secret Ballot Act.
Vicki E. Alger
Vicki E. Alger, Ph.D., is President & CEO of Vicki Murray & Associates, LLC, in Phoenix, Arizona. She is also Senior Fellow and Director of the Women for School Choice Project at the Independent Women’s Forum in Washington, D.C., and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, where she is completing a book examining the history of the U.S. Department of Education.
More speakers to be announced soon! Check back for updates.
Register for the 2012 Arizona Regional Conference HERE!