Dave Kopel is Research Director of the Independence Institute; an Associate Policy Analyst with the Cato Institute, in Washington; and adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at the University of Denver’s  Sturm College of Law. His website is www.davekopel.org. He is a regular panelist on Colorado Public Television’s “Colorado Inside Out”, and a columnist for the Washington Post on the Post’s Volokh Conspiracy law blog.

Kopel writes on constitutional law, criminal justice, civil rights, firearms policy, international affairs, technology, politics, environmental policy, and the media. He is the author of 17 books, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, and over 100 scholarly journal articles. His newspaper articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Among his journal publications are articles in journals from Yale, Harvard, NYU, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, and the University of Pennsylvania. His briefs have been cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justices Alito, Breyer, and Stevens, and his research has been cited by ten state Supreme Court cases, ten federal Circuit Court of Appeals cases, and in over 600 law review articles. The Seventh Circuit described his scholarship as a correct model of “originalist interpretive method as applied to the Second Amendment.”

Kopel’s book The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? was named book of the year by the American Society of Criminology, Division of International Criminology. Before joining the Independence Institute, Kopel served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Colorado, dealing with enforcement of hazardous waste, Superfund, and other environmental laws. In 1998-99, he served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. He holds a J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, and a B.A. in History with honors from Brown University.