Panelists
Robert Bastress is is the John W. Fisher II Professor of Law and teaches Constitutional Law, West Virginia Constitutional Law, and Employment Discrimination. Prior to coming to WVU in 1978, he practiced law in Kentucky for the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund and was an Abraham Freedman Fellow at the Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia. Throughout his career, Bastress has engaged in extensive litigation dealing with constitutional, civil rights, and employment law issues. He is a Fellow of the West Virginia State Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Bastress is the author of The West Virginia Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2016), and co-author of Interviewing, Counseling and Negotiating Skills for Effective Representation (Little Brown & Co., 1990). He earned his J.D. from Vanderbilt University and LL.M. from Temple University.
Anne Marie Lofaso is the Arthur B. Hodges Professor of Law at WVU. She teaches labor and employment law, jurisprudence, and comparative labor law. Lofaso spent ten years as an attorney with the National Labor Relations Board’s Appellate and Supreme Court Branches. Prior to that, she worked as an associate for Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy’s Business Reorganization Department and clerked for the Hon. James L. Oakes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Lofaso is a prolific writer in the area of labor law and coal miner safety and has been published in numerous law reviews including the Harvard Law and Policy Review. Her textbooks Modern Labor Law in the Private and Public Sectors (Lexis Publishing with Harris, Slater, and Gregory) and Mastering Labor Law (Carolina Academic Press with Secunda, Hirsch, and Slater), are the among the first U.S. labor-law-education books to treat both private and public-sector labor law. Lofaso earned an A.B. from Harvard, magna cum laude, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a D.Phil from Oxford, where she read law as a Fulbright Scholar.
John E. Taylor is the Jackson Kelly Professor at the West Virginia University College of Law, where he teaches Constitutional Law I, Criminal Procedure I, Criminal Law, Torts I, Education Law, and a seminar on the law of church and state. He joined the College of Law faculty in 2002 and served as the College’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2010 to 2013 and again from 2014 to 2015. Professor Taylor writes primarily about First Amendment issues in the public schools. He was named Professor of the Year for the College of Law in 2017, and he received the College of Law’s Significant Faculty Scholarship Award in 2006 for his article entitled Using Suppression Hearing Testimony to Prove Good Faith Under United States v. Leon. Before joining the legal academy, Professor Taylor clerked for the Honorable M. Blane Michael on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He holds a J.D. with highest honors and an A.B. with distinction from the University of North Carolina, as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Religious Studies from Stanford University.
