Gerry W. Beyer joined the faculty of the Texas Tech University School of Law in June 2005 as the first holder of the Governor Preston E. Smith Regents Professorship. Previously, Prof. Beyer taught at St. Mary’s University and has served as a visiting professor at several other law schools including Boston College, The Ohio State University, Southern Methodist University, the University of New Mexico, Santa Clara University, and La Trobe University (Australia). He is the recipient of dozens of outstanding and distinguished faculty awards including the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the most prestigious university-wide teaching award at Texas Tech. Prof. Beyer was also the recipient of the 2012-2013 Outstanding Researcher Award from the Texas Tech School of Law. As a state and nationally recognized expert in estate planning, Prof. Beyer is a highly sought after lecturer. He presents dozens of continuing legal education presentations each year for many state and local bar associations, universities, and civic groups. Prof. Beyer is the editor of the most popular estate planning blawg in the nation which for the past four years has been named to the ABA Journal's Blawg 100. He has authored and co-authored numerous books and articles focusing on various aspects of estate planning, including a two volume treatise on Texas wills law, an estate planning casebook, and the Wills, Trusts, and Estates volume of the Examples & Explanations series. He has three times won awards from the American Bar Association’s Probate & Property magazine for his writing and is one of the most often downloaded law authors on the Social Science Research Network. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the REPTL Reporter, the official journal of the Real Estate, Probate and Trust Law Section of the State Bar of Texas. Prof. Beyer serves as a mentor to many students and various law school organizations as well participating regularly in pro bono activities. He is the advisor for the Estate Planning and Community Property Law Journal and its annual seminar. Professor Beyer received his J.D. from the Ohio State University and his LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from the University of Illinois. He is a member of the Order of the Coif, an Academic Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and a member of the American Law Institute.

Naomi Cahn is the Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School. She has written numerous law review articles on family law, feminist jurisprudence, and reproductive technology. She is the author of several books, including The New Kinship (forthcoming 2012); and Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation (2009); she has co-authored On the Frontlines: Women, Gender, and the Post-Conflict Process (2011(with Professors Fionnuala Ni Aoláin and Dina Haynes); Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (2010) (with Professor June Carbone); and she has co-written casebooks in the fields of family law, trusts, and estates. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New Yorker, and she has appeared on numerous media outlets including NPR, MSNBC, and bloggingheadstv.com. Professor Cahn is a Senior Fellow at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, and a member of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project, for which she and her co-investigators have received outside funding to conduct research on public attitudes towards gay and lesbian parenting. From 2002 to 2004, Professor Cahn was on leave in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Prior to joining the faculty at GW Law in 1993, Professor Cahn practiced with Hogan Lovells in Washington, DC and with Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. At GW Law, she teaches courses on family law, trusts and estates, elder law, and child, family, and state.