Learn more about the speakers for the National Preservation Law Conference on November 5, 2025.

Ross M. Bradford is a senior associate general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where he supervises the organization’s Easement Program and oversees gifts of real estate transactions. He also provides general corporate legal services on a wide range of subjects and provides support for advocacy related matters affecting National Trust historic sites.

Ross received a BA in political science and English literature from Emory University and a JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is licensed to practice law in the State of North Carolina and the District of Columbia.

Christopher (Chris) Cody is associate general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where he focuses on legal advocacy. Mr. Cody previously served as deputy state historic preservation officer for Arizona and as manager of advocacy and staff attorney for Historic Charleston Foundation in Charleston, South Carolina.

Chris is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (BA History), the University of South Carolina School of Law, and Tulane University’s Master of Preservation Studies program. A native of McLean, Virginia, Mr. Cody resides in Northern Virginia with his wife Kathryn and daughter Genevieve.

Will Cook is an attorney at Cultural Heritage Partners, PLLC, a historic preservation and cultural heritage law firm. Previously, he served as associate general counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and worked as legal counsel at an international auction house in New York City. Will is also a board member on the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, New York Preservation Archive Project, Valleys Planning Council, and Ladew Topiary Gardens. He teaches preservation law and lectures regularly to national audiences on issues related to property, land use, and historic preservation law.

Kelly Fanizzo is the General Counsel of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP). She first joined the ACHP in February 2006 as a historic preservation specialist and then a program analyst in the Office of Federal Agency Programs. She stepped away from the ACHP in 2009-2011 to pursue a teaching fellowship and LL.M. from Temple University, Beasley School of Law, where she taught legal research and writing and land use planning. She returned to the ACHP as a program analyst and attorney-advisor, before moving into the Office of General Counsel full time in 2013. Kelly has a law degree from American University, Washington College of Law, and an LL.M. in legal education from Temple University. She received her B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College and also holds a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from The George Washington University. Prior to her time at the ACHP, she practiced environmental law for the Navy’s Office of General Counsel in Washington, D.C.

Andrea C. Ferster is an attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C. and New York stateShe brings 37 years of experience in enforcing federal and local historic preservation laws on behalf of numerous local governments, nonprofits, and community associations in federal and state courts across the country.www.andreafersterlaw.com Her clients include the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, where she serves as general counsel.Andrea lectures frequently on historic preservation law at historic preservation conferences and continuing legal education programs and is a regular guest lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Architecture on historic preservation law.

In 2009, Andrea received the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board Chairman’s Award for Excellence in Law and Public Policy. Andrea served as President of the D.C. Bar from 2013-14.

Erik Hein is the executive director of the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers (NCSHPO), the national organization representing the state Historic Preservation Offices in every state, territory, and the District of Columbia before elected federal officials, federal agencies, national nonprofits, and the public. Before this position, which he has held since 2013, he was the president of Preservation Action, a national grassroots nonprofit organization focused entirely on federal historic preservation policy. Prior to that Erik held various positions at statewide, local, and municipal historic preservation organizations and offices in Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia.

A national leader in historic preservation, Erik currently also serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations, including the Preservation Action Foundation, National Preservation Institute, National Preservation Partners Network, Preservation Delaware, and the Lewes Historical Society.

In addition to extensive public policy and nonprofit experience, Erik’s background is in communications and architectural history. He studied nineteenth century art and architecture at the Victoria University of Manchester, United Kingdom, and holds an undergraduate degree from the Penn State University and an MA in American studies/historic preservation from the George Washington University.

Dennis R. Hughes is a partner in Holland & Knight LLP's District of Columbia office and a member of the firm’s DC and Northern Virginia Land Use Group. He represents private developers, institutions, colleges and universities, foreign missions, trade associations, and individual landowners in matters involving zoning, historic preservation, construction code and municipal law and regulation.

Dennis leads clients through the many local and federal regulatory processes controlling development and construction in the District of Columbia.With nearly 30,000 structures in DC subject to landmarking and/or design review, historic preservation considerations are often central to the overall viability of redevelopment projects.Dennis works with clients, architects, lenders and government officials to address these issues in meaningful and creative ways.He also counsels clients across the country on matters involving federal, state, and local historic preservation law and regulation.

Prior to joining Holland & Knight, Dennis provided legal advocacy and archival research for the Historic Charleston Foundation in South Carolina and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Virginia.

Dennis holds a BA in American history and political science from Vanderbilt University, a JD with certificate in environmental law from Tulane University Law School, and a MArchH with certificate in historic preservation from the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

Outside the office, Dennis serves on the Board of Trustees for The L’Enfant Trust, easement holder for more than 1,100 historic properties within the District of Columbia.He also participates as a citizen member of the Albemarle County Virginia Historic Preservation Committee.

Jackie Iwata has worked on complex multi-court litigation to protect federal lands, including defending national monuments and a successful challenge to reinstate Arctic and Atlantic Ocean leasing withdrawals. She has also litigated cases relating to drinking water, stormwater runoff, and Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Prior to returning to NRDC as a staff attorney, she was a Koob Fellow with NRDC’s litigation team and worked with Earthjustice and the U.S. Department of Labor. Iwata holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from George Washington University and a JD from Stanford Law School. After law school, she clerked for Chief Judge David Mannheimer on the Alaska Court of Appeals and Judge Juan Torruella on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Thompson (Tom) Mayes is chief legal officer and general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As chief legal officer, he oversees the National Trust’s legal defense fund, which advocates for the protection of significant places and defends and strengthens historic preservation laws throughout the United States; the historic preservation easements program, which protects over 135 historic places throughout the country; and the full range of corporate law matters for the National Trust, including specialized areas of historic site management and museum law. Tom serves as the National Trust’s representative on the boards of the Montpelier Foundation, Main Street America, and the National Trust Community Development Corporation.

Tom has written and spoken widely on preservation law, the underlying purposes of historic preservation, and the future of preservation. For many years, he taught historic preservation law at the University of Maryland. A lifelong preservationist, Tom serves as a member of his local historic preservation commission in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation in 2013, Tom is the author of Why Old Places Matter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).

Tom received his BA, with honors, in history in 1981, his JD in 1985 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. He joined the National Trust’s legal team in 1986.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Merritt is deputy general counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where she has been responsible for the organization’s legal advocacy program for almost forty years. Although Betsy is known for her litigation work, having represented the National Trust in hundreds of cases in state and federal courts, including dozens of transportation cases, she has a stronger interest in using negotiation and administrative advocacy to persuade government agencies to make more preservation-sensitive decisions, especially through consultation under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.

In addition to her litigation and advocacy experience, Betsy has lectured widely on preservation law, and she has testified before Congress regarding transportation policy and other issues relating to historic preservation. She has also been directly influential in shaping legislation and regulations implementing Section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.

Ms. Meritt is a native of Seattle, Washington. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 1980, and from Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1976.

Carol Quillen is president and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As the eighteenth president of Davidson (2011 – 2022), she sought to honor the college’s abiding values – integrity, humane instincts, creativity, discipline, leadership, and service – within our rapidly evolving, increasingly interconnected world. To that end, she helped the campus define a vision founded on ensuring access and affordability, reimagining the liberal arts for today, and equipping graduates to have disproportionate impact for good. Carol strengthened the commitment to meeting 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for all students with no packaged loans. Nationally, she is a founding member of the American Talent Initiative (ATI), a consortium that aims to graduate annually 50,000 additional low and moderate-income students from the nation’s top colleges and universities.

Leadership for Quillen means creating a context where communities can make the changes they want or need to make to become more just, more humane, and better equipped to fulfill their shared aims. With her guidance, Davidson built on a liberal arts philosophy to develop a three-pronged model for education that serves the aspirations of a broadly diverse, very talented student body who live within a complex global society. The college’s students cultivate core capacities, like empathy, humane instincts, self-awareness, and intellectual humility; they learn transferable skills, such as creative problem-solving, quantitative analysis, cross-cultural collaboration and effective communication; and they develop technical expertise in their chosen fields, from computer science to art to public health. Combined with local and global experiential learning opportunities – internships, international study, entrepreneurial projects, and community engagement – they graduate ready to lead meaningful, impactful lives.

Realizing this vision required a flexible and inclusive organization, Quillen restructured and diversified the leadership team, supported a reorganization of the board, developed an agile strategic framework to guide resource allocation, and built partnerships with organizations whose aspirations align with those of Davidson. In this work, she relied on Davidson’s long-standing commitment to both community and good stewardship.

Beyond Davidson, Carol has advocated for educational equity, institutional accountability, freedom of inquiry, honesty about our history, and the value of the liberal arts. Among other roles, she cochaired, with General Robert Caslen, the NCAA’s Commission to Combat Campus Sexual Violence and she served on President Obama’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans. She has spoken at numerous venues, including the Aspen Ideas Festival, edX Global Forum, and the Milken Global Conference. Her writings have appeared in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Huffington Post, The Hechinger Report, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She has served on the boards of the Kinkaid School (Houston, Texas), American Council on Education (Washington, D.C.), the Levine Museum of the New South (Charlotte, North Carolina), and Credential Engine, a national organization that enables “credential transparency” in the post-secondary educational sector.

Dan Sakura has worked for over twenty-five years with the Japanese American community, non-profit partners and the National Park Service to create, expand and protect World War II Japanese American confinement sites. A descendant of Minidoka survivors, Dan led the effort to designate, expand and protect the Minidoka National Historic Site in Idaho from the Lava Ridge wind project. He’s currently working to defend Minidoka from the Southwest Intertie Project-North (SWIP-N) 500 kV power line in FERC, Idaho Public Utilities Commission and Jerome County, Idaho. He’s advising the Tule Lake Committee to defend the Tule Lake National Monument from the Federal Aviation Administration’s proposed airport fence. He also helps non-profit clients secure NPS Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grants, Historic Preservation Fund appropriations and other federal funding. Dan received his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center and is admitted to the California Bar.

Shaw Sprague is the vice president of government relations and policy for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He serves as a primary liaison with Congress and the Administration on federal preservation policy issues. Shaw leads a team of seasoned federal advocates to identify key and emerging issues, develop policy solutions, and help set federal preservation policy priorities in collaboration with the preservation field and legal advocacy staff of the National Trust. Shaw serves as the NATIONAL TRUST’s ex officio board representative for both President Lincoln’s Cottage as well as Preservation Action. He also serves as an advisory trustee of Maine Preservation.

Prior to joining the National Trust, Shaw worked for three years as a senior legislative representative for the Trust for Public Land in Washington. In this capacity, Shaw represented the organization’s policy and appropriations priorities to committee, subcommittee, and member staff. From late 2005 – 2009, Shaw served on the Hill for Senator Susan Collins as her principal advisor on national resource and trade issues.

Shaw is a graduate of Suffolk University Law School and a member of the Massachusetts Bar. He earned a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Marion Forsyth Werkheiser is an award-winning lawyer and internationally recognized trailblazer in the cultural heritage field. Her well-established practice is firmly rooted at the intersection of preservation and development. She has a proven track record of convening diverse stakeholders to identify shared values, solve tough problems, and scale solutions.

Marion’s creative approach to resolving threats to historic properties has led to first-of-their-kind agreements between developers and Tribal Nations, African-American descendant communities, and local governments that have resulted in tens of millions of dollars of investment in preservation priorities. She thrives on pursuing justice for communities who care about historic places and improving corporate governance to reduce risks to those communities’ rights.

Marion is co-founder and managing partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, PLLC. Marion earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School and is licensed to practice in California, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Indiana University, where she was a Wells Scholar and earned her B.A. degree in political science and classical civilization with an emphasis in art and archaeology.

The Register of Professional Archaeologists honored Marion with the John F. Seiberling Award for her significant and sustained efforts in the conservation of archaeological resources, and she is a recipient of the 2023 Albert Simons Medal of Excellence in Historic Preservation.

Michael West is a Senior Associate in Appellate practice at Hogan Lovells. Michael has experience litigating at every level of the federal judiciary—and in multiple state courts—across a wide range of issues, including constitutional, antitrust, administrative, patent, copyright, tort, and criminal law.

Michael has briefed dozens of appeals in federal and state court, including four merits cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has argued before the Sixth Circuit and in New York’s appellate court. Michael also maintains an active pro bono practice. Among his other matters, Michael convinced a federal court to reduce a defendant’s mandatory life sentence to time served. Michael also represented several families separated at the southern border in a lawsuit against the federal government.