Clark Neily

Senior Vice President

Cato Institute

Clark Neily

Senior Vice President

Cato Institute

Clark Neily is senior vice president for legal studies at the Cato Institute. His areas of interest include constitutional law, overcriminalization, coercive plea bargaining, police accountability, and gun rights. Before joining Cato in 2017, Neily was a senior attorney and constitutional litigator at the Institute for Justice and director of the Institute’s Center for Judicial Engagement.

Neily is an adjunct professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, where he teaches constitutional litigation and public‐​interest law. He served as co‐​counsel in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun.

Neily is the author of Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.

Neily received a BA in Plan II (with concentrations in philosophy and Russian) from the University of Texas at Austin, and he received his law degree from the University of Texas, where he was chief articles editor of the Texas Law Review.

A person listed as a contributor has spoken or otherwise participated in Regulatory Transparency Project events, publications, or multimedia presentations. A person's appearance on the website does not imply an endorsement or relationship between the person and the Regulatory Transparency Project. The Regulatory Transparency Project takes no position on particular legal or public policy issues. All expressions of opinion by a contributor are those of the contributor.

Contributions

Deep Dive Episode 150 – Regulating Business in the Age of COVID-19

December 10, 2020

In this live podcast, Brian Kabateck, Luke Wake, and Clark Neily address vital questions raised by COVID-19, including whether this is the right time for states to liberalize economic regulations more generally.

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2018 JLEP Symposium: Regulating the Modern Workforce

March 7, 2018

Government regulation is intended to improve the efficiency of markets and protect people from harms they cannot identify or prevent on their own. But, for decades, advocates have debated whether the regulatory process and rules developed through it are too strict or too lax; whether they properly account for all the things society values; and even whether they make society better or worse off on balance. The Journal of Law, Economics & Policy’s Symposium on Regulatory Reform, Transparency, and the Economy explored these and related questions as leading scholars and practitioners examined a number of recent regulatory proposals impacting a broad swath of the American economy – from banking and finance to energy and the environment, and from employment law to the internet economy. Speakers considered and debated how well these proposals would perform their intended functions and how they might be improved.

The symposium featured discussions of research papers prepared by experts working on the Federalist Society’s Regulatory Transparency Project. The proceedings of the Conference were published in a special symposium issue of George Mason’s Journal of Law, Economics & Policy.

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