Edwin Meese III holds the Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based public policy research and education institution. He is also the Chairman of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California.

Mr. Meese is the author of With Reagan: The Inside Story (Regnery Gateway, 1992); co-editor of Making America Safer (The Heritage Foundation, 1997); and co-author of Leadership, Ethics and Policing, 2nd Edition (Prentice Hall, 2009).

Mr. Meese served as the 75th Attorney General of the United States from February 1985 to August 1988. More recently, he has served on the Iraq Study Group, the National War Powers Commission, and the Evaluation Committee for the National Institute of Justice.

From January 1981 to February 1985, Mr. Meese held the position of Counsellor to the President, the senior position on the White House Staff, where he functioned as President Reagan’s chief policy adviser. As Attorney General and as Counsellor, Mr. Meese was a member of the President’s Cabinet and the National Security Council. He served as Chairman of the Domestic Policy Council and the National Drug Policy Board.

Formerly, Mr. Meese served as Governor Reagan’s Executive Assistant and Chief of Staff in California and as his Legal Affairs Secretary. He also served as Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County, California, and was a professor of law at the University of San Diego, where he also was Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management.

Mr. Meese is a graduate of Yale University, Class of 1953, and holds a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a retired colonel in the United States Army Reserve.