Michael (Avi) Helfand is the senior legal advisor to the Teach Coalition. He also serves as the Brenden Mann Foundation Chair in Law and Religion and Co-Director of the Nootbaar Institute for Law, Religion and Ethics at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law as well as the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. His research considers how U.S. law treats religious law, religious institutions and religious practices. Professor Helfand’s academic articles have appeared in numerous law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, New York University Law Review, and Duke Law Journal. He also often provides media commentary on clashes between law and religion, writing for various public audience publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the Forward. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, PhD in Political Science from Yale University and B.A. from Yeshiva College.  

John Meiser is an associate clinical professor at Notre Dame Law School and director of the Law School’s Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic. He researches and teaches in the areas of religious liberty, litigation practice, and federal courts. Prior to joining Notre Dame, Professor Meiser taught and practiced law in a variety of contexts, including as a career law clerk to a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as assistant counsel to the Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Commerce, and in private practice as an appellate litigator in Washington, D.C. Meiser earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Notre Dame Law Review and received the Col. William J. Hoynes Award, the Law School’s highest honor. 

Nicole Stelle Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, where she also serves as the Associate Dean for External Engagement and directs the Notre Dame Education Law Project. Her teaching and research focus on education law and policy, religious liberty, and topics related to property law (especially land use and urban development policies). In addition to dozens of articles on these subjects, she is the author of Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Ordering the City: Land Use, Policing and the Restoration of Urban America (Yale University Press, 2009).

Garnett received her B.A. with distinction in Political Science from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Morris S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining the law school faculty in 1999, she worked for two years as a staff attorney at the Institute for Justice, a non-profit public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C., where she helped to defend the constitutionality of the nation’s first private-school-choice programs.

At Notre Dame, Garnett is a faculty fellow in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, and deNicola Center for Ethics and Culture. She also is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

EPIC Coalition (Empowerment, Purpose and Inclusion for Children) is a multifaith coalition committed to ensuring every child has access to a quality education that meets their needs. We believe in greater investments for all types of schools to expand student opportunities, regardless of socioeconomic or religious background.

Teach Coalition, a project of the Orthodox Union, is a nonpartisan, multi-state, grassroots movement devoted to advocating for equitable funding for nonpublic schools. Teach Coalition works to make nonpublic schools better, safer and more affordable. Teach Coalition advocates on behalf of approximately 90% of Jewish day school and yeshivah students nationwide and counts more than 90,000 dedicated volunteers, activists and subscribers among its supporters.

Established in 2020 upon a foundational gift from Matt and Lindsay Moroun, Notre Dame Law School’s Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic is one of the world’s leading academic institutions dedicated to promoting and defending religious freedom.

Within Notre Dame Law School’s [Catholic tradition](https://law.nd.edu/about/mission-history/), the Clinic integrates teaching, research, and service to stand as a source of advocacy, counsel, scholarship, fellowship, and hope in defense of the fundamental right to religious freedom for all people. We envision a world with robust legal protections for religious liberty and a shared cultural commitment to this foundational human right, so that it may flourish for all people.

The Notre Dame Education Law Project seeks to enhance civil society, promote educational opportunity, and protect religious liberty by supporting educational pluralism in elementary and secondary education through research, scholarship, and advocacy in both the courts and court of public opinion. Through this work, the Education Law Project advances the goals of empowering parents, in recognition of their rights and duties as their children’s primary educators, and to expanding the range of high quality educational options available for all children, particularly the underserved, with an emphasis on disadvantaged communities, parental-choice programs, religious liberty, and the challenges and opportunities facing Catholic and other faith-based schools