Carolyn Shapiro, Associate Dean, Academic Administration and Strategic Initiatives, Co-Director, Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States, Professor, Chicago-Kent School of Law.

Professor Shapiro is the founder and co-director of Chicago-Kent's Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States (ISCOTUS).Her scholarship 

focuses on the institutions of our constitutional democracy, in particular the Supreme Court, and how those institutions interact. From 2014 through mid-2016, Professor Shapiro served as Illinois solicitor general while on leave from Chicago-Kent. She has argued cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Seventh Circuit, the Illinois Supreme Court, and the Illinois Appellate Courts. 

Shapiro earned a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from the Harris School of Public Policy, and a J.D.) from the University of Chicago Law School.

Colleen Connell, Executive Director, ACLU of Illinois.

In 2001, Colleen Connell became the first woman attorney to lead the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. As Executive Director, Ms. Connell expanded the organization’s legislative and communications programs, its national security and informational privacy docket, and its institutional reform litigation. Under her direction, the ACLU of Illinois has adopted a strategy of integrated advocacy, using every tool at its disposal – public communications, litigation, community engagement, and advocacy – strategically and in concert to defend and expand fundamental liberties and rights in the most effective ways possible.  

She has litigated rights of the mentally ill; equal access to education; housing discrimination; employment discrimination on behalf of women, freedom of speech and association; and before the U.S. Supreme Court, cases involving the women’s right to control their own reproductive health.

A native of North Dakota, Colleen graduated from North Dakota State University and the University of Iowa School of Law.