About StatesRise
Advisory Board
The StatesRise Advisory Board helps guide the organization’s work with experience in constitutional law, public policy, advocacy, scholarship, and civic life.
Chair, Advisory Board
Robert F. Williams
Robert F. Williams, Advisory Board Chair, is Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at Rutgers Law School and co-founder of the Center for State Constitutional Studies. One of the nation’s leading scholars of state constitutional law, he is the author of The Law of American State Constitutions and numerous influential works on independent state constitutional rights and interpretation.
Before entering academia, Professor Williams served in a variety of public service and legal roles, including executive director of Florida Legal Services, legislative assistant to Florida Senator Bob Graham, and staff attorney with Legal Services of Greater Miami. He also worked internationally as an International Legal Center Fellow in Kabul, Afghanistan.
For more than four decades, Professor Williams has helped shape the modern study of state constitutional law through his scholarship, teaching, and public engagement. His writings on state constitutional rights, federalism, and constitutional interpretation are widely cited by scholars, litigators, and courts throughout the United States.
He earned degrees from Florida State University, the University of Florida College of Law, New York University School of Law, and Columbia Law School. He is admitted to the bars of Florida, New Jersey, and the United States Supreme Court.
Bob and his wife Alaine live in Haddonfield, NJ, close to their son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters. They love to travel and spend summers in Wisconsin.
Advisory Board
Anthony Sanders
Anthony Sanders is Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice and a senior attorney with the organization. A leading scholar of state constitutional law, he is the author of Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters, an influential examination of how state constitutions protect rights beyond those expressly enumerated in constitutional text.
Through litigation, scholarship, public speaking, and media outreach, Anthony has advanced understanding of the judiciary’s role in enforcing constitutional limits on government power and safeguarding individual liberty. His work has appeared in leading law reviews and public-policy publications, and he is a frequent commentator on state constitutions, judicial review, economic liberty, property rights, and free speech. He also hosts the widely followed Short Circuit podcast.
Before joining the Institute for Justice in 2010, Anthony clerked for Justice W. William Leaphart of the Montana Supreme Court and practiced law in Chicago, where he chaired the Chicago Bar Association’s Civil Rights Committee. He earned his law degree, cum laude, from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he served on the Minnesota Law Review, and now serves as an Adjunct Professor at the law school.
