SPEAKER BIO: Raymond Gifford

Ray Gifford is president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation and a member of its board. Before joining the Foundation in 2003, Gifford served as chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission for four years, following his appointment by Governor Bill Owens. As a regulator, he aspired to a competitive, consumer-driven telecommunications market; a low-cost, unbundled natural gas utility; a reliable, efficient electric system; and an economically rational regulatory scheme for transportation. Before joining the Commission, Gifford served under then-Colorado Attorney General (now Bush cabinet member) Gale Norton as first assistant attorney general. From 1993-1996, he worked for two national law firms-Kirkland & Ellis and Baker & Hostetler. The meager satisfactions of private practice lead him scrambling into the Attorney General’s office. Gifford earned his law degree from the University of Chicago, where he absorbed the “law and economics” jurisprudence for which the school is (in)famous. He thus burdens his colleagues with his views on: the Coase theorem, public choice theory, and the Chicago School antitrust revolution. In law school, he served as president of the Federalist Society and chairman of the Edmund Burke Society. He began his legal career as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard P. Matsch of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Gifford studied philosophy, earning a Bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, home to the “Great Books” curriculum. Gifford teaches a seminar on the Law and Economics of the Information Age at the University of Colorado School of Law. He is a member of the American Law Institute.