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Cheadle was born in Kansas City, Mo., to middle-class parents, a psychologist and a teacher. After graduating from the California Institute for the Arts, he got a breakthrough role as a gangbanger in the 1988 in the film Colors. From there, he went on to numerous films, including Devil in a Blue Dress, Boogie Nights, Traffic and all of the Ocean's films. But the pivotal role for both his career and his personal life came in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, in which he played Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who personally saved more than 1,000 Tutsis from genocide at the hands of his fellow Hutus. The role took him to Africa and marked the beginning of a friendship with Rusesabagina, who since the Rwandan genocide has worked to end other racial conflicts in the region.

Ed Wilson is a Professor and Curator of Entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Wilson is one of today's finest scholars and naturalists, and he is one of the world's leading authorities on ants. He visited Team Scarab at Nebraska in 1998 and was made an honorary scarab worker. With fellow entomologist Bert Holldobler, Ed has written the definitive volume on ants, which won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. He also won an earlier Pulitzer in 1979 for his book entitled *On Human Nature*. Ed is the recipient of the National Medal of Science, the International Prize for Biology, the gold medal of the World Wildlife Fund, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the American Humanist Association, and the Crafoord Prize from the Swedish Academy of Sciences (which is ecology's approximation of the Nobel prize).

Linda Lear was educated at Women's schools and finished graduate work at Columbia University. Before finishing her doctorate, she taught American history and ended up teaching in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s-just in time to become an activist. Linda have had a long career in college and university teaching and have written a variety of books and articles, specializing in environmental history. Lear held Fellowships at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library and at the Smithsonian Institution. With the publication of her biography of Rachel Carson, *Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature*, in 1997, her writing and lecturing career began. The biography of Carson was awarded the prize for the best book on women in science by the History of Science Society for 1998. A new edition will be published in 2009. Linda Lear's *Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature*, the biography of the famous children's author and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was published in the UK by AllenLane/Penguin in January 2007, and by St. Martin's Press in the US by St. Martin's Press. It won the Lakeland Book of the Year prize in 2007, the most prestigious of England's regional literary prizes; the first time ever given to an American writer. The biography appeared in paper in both countries in 2008. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of my alma mater, Connecticut College and honored with the Goodwin-Niering Center Alumni Environmental Achievement Award in 1999. In 2007, Chatham College (now Chatham University) awarded Lear an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.

Judith Martin's "Miss Manners" newspaper column - distributed thrice-weekly by *United Feature Syndicate* and carried in more than 200 newspapers in the US and abroad - has chronicled the continuous rise and fall of American manners since 1978. Readers send "Miss Manners" not only their table and party questions, but those involving the more complicated aspects of life - romance, work, family relationships, child-rearing, death - as well as philosophical and moral dilemmas. In her columns and her books, Martin explains the etiquette element present in nearly every aspect of life. "Judith Martin is The National Bureau of Standards," states columnist George Will. *The New York Times* declares her work "an impassioned plea for a return to civilized behavior." *The Los Angeles Times *deems her "an authentic visionary" and her writing "a kind of study in cultural anthropology, even if she dresses up her field notes with artful parody and self-deprecating humor." Writer Christopher Buckley calls her "an authentic comic genius." Martin writes an additional "Miss Manners" column for the Microsoft Network, and is also a contributing editor at *Family Circle Magazine* and a columnist at *Child Magazine*. She is a frequent lecturer and guest on national television and radio shows. As a reporter, feature writer and critic, she spent 25 years at *The Washington Post*, where she was one of the original members of the Style and Weekend sections. In addition to her most recent book, *Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (Freshly Updated) (W.W. Norton & Co., April 2005)*, Martin has written 10 other Miss Manners books and two novels. Martin is a graduate of Wellesley College and has been awarded honorary degrees.

**The Honorable Margaret H. Marshall** was born in South Africa where, as a student, she led the National Union of South African Students, working to end oppressive minority rule and achieve equality for all South Africans. Marshall first came to the US as a high school exchange student in Wilmington, DL in 1962, as the civil rights battles were beginning to boil over, and later returned to the US for graduate school, where she became involved with the anti-war and the women’s movements. After Yale Law School, she entered private practice, became President of the Boston Bar Association, Vice President & General Counsel for Harvard University, and then went on to the State’s Supreme Court, where she became the first female Chief Justice of the oldest continuously serving appellate court in the Western Hemisphere. Though she has had many accomplishments, Justice Marshall is most renowned for her 2003 opinion which led Massachusetts to become the first state in the nation to outlaw the ban on same-sex marriage. Although she loved her time on the bench, Justice Marshall stepped down in 2010. She now mentors young lawyers at her former law firm, Choate Hall & Stewart, and teaches at Harvard University.

Professor Lipton joined the Case Western Reserve Faculty in 1980 after practicing as a social worker and attorney for Legal Aid. She helped to establish the J.D./M.S.S.A. dual degree program. She is the co-director of the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center and teaches in the Criminal Justice and Health Law Clinics. Her current research and practice focuses on inter-disciplinary strategies for addressing domestic violence and the rights of immigrant victims of family violence.

Douglas Laycock is one of the nation's leading authorities on the law of remedies and also on the law of religious liberty. Before joining Virginia's faculty in 2010, Laycock served as the Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Prior to that he taught for 25 years at the University of Texas and for five years at the University of Chicago. Laycock has testified frequently before Congress and has argued many cases in the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the author of the leading casebook *Modern American Remedies*; the award-winning monograph *The Death of the Irreparable Injury Rule*; and many articles in the leading law reviews. He has co-edited a collection of essays, *Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty*, and he recently published *Religious Liberty, Volume I: Overviews and History*, the first of a four-volume collection of his many writings on religious liberty. He is vice president of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2009 winner of the National First Freedom Award from the Council on America's First Freedom. Laycock earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Abner S. Greene has taught at Fordham Law School since 1994. He was awarded Teacher of the Year in 2002. He currently teaches First Amendment, Federal Courts, Administrative Law, and Criminal Law. New York University Press published his book *Understanding the 2000 Election: A Guide to the Legal Battles that Decided the Presidency*. Professor Greene has published widely on constitutional law, primarily the First Amendment, in the *Yale Law Journal*, *Columbia Law Review*, *University of Chicago Law Review*, *Vanderbilt Law Review*, and the *Supreme Court Review*, among other places. He graduated *magna cum laude* from Yale College and *summa cum laude* from Michigan Law School, and then clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald of the D.C. Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court.