When Trace Mitchell was in fifth grade, his parents got a phone call from his teacher.
“He’s very … political, for a fifth grader,” she said. “Do you talk to him about politics a lot?”
“Never,” his parents said. “HE is the one who talks to US about politics!”
A couple of decades later, his love for politics hasn’t changed, but his viewpoints sure have. “I was a traditional conservative,” he said. “I thought libertarians were just Republicans who liked to smoke weed.”
He did more than shake off that belief. He embraced the philosophy of liberty, and today, at 29 years old as of publication in 2025, is one of its most influential proponents on Capitol Hill.
Learning Liberty from Bastiat
Never mind fifth grade; Mitchell was five years old when he first told his parents he wanted to be a lawyer.
“If we’re supposed to care about and serve other people, and we are, that always seemed like one of the most direct ways to do so,” he said. And in his brief but successful legal career, which has included clerking for the Honorable Justice Biran of the Supreme Court of Maryland, he has already worked on multiple cases that ended up in the United States Supreme Court.
One of those cases — the joint hearing of Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton — sought to apply the First Amendment to online platforms. Another — DeVillier v. Texas — helped define the scope of the Fifth Amendment’s “Takings” clause.
Part of the reason he has accomplished so much, so young, is that he started college two years early. At age 16, he enrolled at Florida Gulf Coast University … intending to join the College Republicans.
But in his “early start” program, he met peers who had joined an organization called Students For Liberty. The group caught his attention after their faculty advisor put a slim but powerful book in his hands.
“I read Bastiat’s The Law, and I remember thinking: ‘I don’t know exactly what this philosophy is, but I know it’s mine,’” he said.
Reading The Law — and Fighting for It
“I became an active member,” he said of Eagles For Liberty, Florida Gulf Coast University’s SFL student group. “And I had already walked pretty far down the road toward classical liberalism … but that was also when I met a guest speaker named Justin Pearson.”
Mitchell had wanted to be an attorney since he was young. What he didn’t know, but was about to learn, was that you could make a career out of pro-liberty lawyering.
Pearson was — and still is — a lawyer with the Institute for Justice (IJ), a pro-liberty law firm. He was working on a case in which a small dairy farm was suing the state of Florida; even though it was completely legal to sell, the state wouldn’t let them use the term ‘skim milk’ for their … skim milk, because it was not artificially injected with vitamins.
“It was incredible, to me, that this was even a case,” Mitchell said. “I mean, A is A; skim milk is skim milk. That really fired me up.”
Entering the Workforce
Mitchell was so fired up by the work that IJ was doing that he redoubled his efforts to get into a good law school and one day sit for the bar. He was accepted into George Mason University and, with the guidance of a mentor he met through Students For Liberty, applied for and earned a fellowship with the Mercatus Center: the Bastiat Fellowship. From there, Mitchell earned a job with Mercatus in technology policy research.
“That was a full-circle moment if ever there was one,” he said of the Bastiat Fellowship. “And that’s when I fell in love with policy research and decided to dedicate my life to it.”
That’s also where his trajectory took off toward where he is today: Deputy Chief Counsel of the House Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust.
“I can’t get into a lot of the specifics of what I do,” he said. “But I can proudly say that I work for one of the few parts of the federal government that is fighting for liberty: making sure that businesses aren’t overburdened by regulations and that regulators aren’t overstepping their bounds. And I am only able to do so because of the policy research skills I developed at Mercatus.” (According to its website, the Mercatus Center is “the premier research center advancing classical liberal ideas and cultivating the talent to apply them.”)
In the intervening years, Mitchell would serve as Policy Counsel for NetChoice, a law clerk for the Supreme Court of Maryland, an attorney with IJ, and as General Counsel for Senator Rand Paul, advising him on the law and making sure the bills Senator Paul supported were based on solid legal and economic research.
“I look back and think about where life could have taken me,” Mitchell said. “Without connecting with SFL, who knows? I’d probably be in some boring job, acting as a run-of-the-mill attorney, doing work that I don’t find meaningful or fulfilling.”
“Instead,” he continued, “I get to spend every day fighting for free markets, limited government, and individual liberty.”
SFL’s Newest Board Member — and a New Chapter in Life
Not yet 30 years old, Trace Mitchell is doing big and meaningful work in Washington, but that’s far from the only thing keeping him busy. In early 2025, he accepted a position on the Students For Liberty Board of Directors. And, best of all, over the summer of 2025, on a sunny day on the beach with his then-girlfriend, he dropped to a knee and said: “I’d love to Coast through life with you. Shell we get married?”
The response? “Shore!”
“I met my fiancée because of George Mason, and I was at George Mason because of SFL,” he said. “Two of the groomsmen at my wedding will be people I met through SFL. At every step in the process, SFL helped me grow intellectually and develop my network of liberty-loving colleagues. There’s not a single component of my life that I can’t attribute in some way to SFL, and now, from the Board, I’m excited to start giving back.”
