Impeachment: victors' justice or due process? Executive accountability and rights to free expression, where are the lines drawn?

Professor Philip Bobbitt

Professor Philip Bobbitt, another distinguished voice on matters of constitutional law, and author of the award-winning book The Shield of Achilles and the international best-selling Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, which examine the evolution of the State and the corresponding changes in the nature of warfare. Professor Bobbitt has served in the federal government through seven presidential administrations. Among these posts, he was formerly Associate Counsel to the President for intelligence and international security; the Legal Counsel to the Senate's Iran-Contra committee; the Counselor on International at the State Department; and the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. He has been a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on International Law and most recently, a member of the External Advisory Board of the CIA.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC

Helena is one of Britain’s most distinguished lawyers and an expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues. Helena has spent her professional life giving voice to those who have least power within the system, championing civil liberties and promoting human rights. She has used many public platforms – including the House of Lords, to which she was elevated in 1997 – to argue with passion, wit and humanity for social justice. She has also written and broadcast on a wide range of issues, from medical negligence to terrorism to the rights of women and children.

She is a member of the House of Lords and chair of Justice, the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists. She is a bencher of Gray’s Inn and president of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She was the chair of Charter 88 from 1992 to 1997, the Human Genetics Commission from 1998 to 2007 and the British Council from 1998 to 2004. She also chaired the Power Inquiry, which reported on the state of British democracy and produced the Power Report in 2006. She has received honours for her work on human rights from the governments of France and Italy and has been awarded more than 30 honorary doctorates.

Professor Laurence Tribe

Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, has taught at its Law School since 1968 and was voted the best professor by the graduating class of 2000. The title “University Professor” is Harvard’s highest academic honor, awarded to just a handful of professors at any given time and to fewer than 70 professors in all of Harvard University’s history. Born in China to Russian Jewish parents, Tribe entered Harvard at 16; graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics (1962) and magna cum laude in Law (1966); clerked for the California and U.S. Supreme Courts(1966-68); received tenure at 30; was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at 38 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2010; helped write the constitutions of South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the Marshall Islands; has received ten honorary degrees, most recently a degree honoris causa from the Government of Mexico in March 2011 that was never before awarded to an American; has prevailed in three-fifths of the many appellate cases he has argued (including 35 in the U.S. Supreme Court); was appointed in 2010 by President Obama and Attorney General Holder to serve as the first Senior Counselor for Access to Justice; and has written 115 books and articles, including his treatise, American Constitutional Law, cited more than any other legal text since 1950. Former Solicitor General Erwin Griswold wrote: “[N]o book, and no lawyer not on the [Supreme] Court, has ever had a greater influence on the development of American constitutional law,” and the Northwestern Law Review opined that no-one else “in American history has… simultaneously achieved Tribe’s preeminence… as a practitioner and… scholar of constitutional law.”

Elaine Kamarck

Elaine Kamarck is a leading political scientist at Brookings Institute in Washington DC and has held White House positions in the Clinton years. Elaine C. Kamarck is a Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies program as well as the Director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. She is an expert on American electoral politics and government innovation and reform in the United States, OECD nations, and developing countries. She focuses her research on the presidential nomination system and American politics and has worked in many American presidential campaigns. Kamarck is the author of “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates” and “Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again.” She is also the author of “How Change Happens—or Doesn’t: The Politics of US Public Policy” and “The End of Government-As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work.” Kamarck is also a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She started at the Kennedy School in 1997 after a career in politics and government. She has been a member of the Democratic National Committee and the DNC’s Rules Committee since 1997. She has participated actively in four presidential campaigns and in ten nominating conventions—including two Republican conventions—and has served as a superdelegate to five Democratic conventions. In the 1980s, she was one of the founders of the New Democrat movement that helped elect Bill Clinton president. She served in the White House from 1993 to 1997, where she created and managed the Clinton Administration's National Performance Review, also known as the “reinventing government initiative.”