Yaron Brook and Steve Simpson

Executive Director, Director of Legal Studies, Ayn Rand Institute

Dr. Yaron Brook (MBA, University of Texas at Austin; PhD, Finance, University of Texas at Austin) is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a columnist at Forbes.com, and his articles have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investor’s Business Daily, and many other publications. He is a frequent guest on national radio and television programs and is a contributing author to both Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea and Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism. Dr. Brook is co-author with ARI fellow Don Watkins of the national best-seller Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. A former finance professor, he speaks internationally on such topics as the causes of the financial crisis, the morality of capitalism, ending the growth of the state, and U.S. foreign policy.<br /> Dr. Brook was born and raised in Israel. He served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence and earned a BSc in civil engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. In 1987 he moved to the United States, where he received his MBA and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin; he became an American citizen in 2003. For seven years he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, and in 1998 he cofounded a financial advisory firm, BH Equity Research, of which he is presently managing director and chairman.<br /> <br /> Steve Simpson is the Director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute. A former Senior Attorney at the Institute for Justice, Steve has litigated constitutional cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and state and federal courts throughout the nation on a wide variety of issues. He was the lead litigator in SpeechNow.org v. FEC, the case that created Super PACs, and has been involved in many other campaign finance, free speech and other constitutional cases. Steve has spoken and written widely on constitutional issues, he has appeared on many television and radio programs, including PBS News Hour and the Stossel show, and his writings have appeared in many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Legal Times, the Chicago Tribune, Slate. Prior to joining IJ, Steve worked in private practice for 6 years and clerked for a federal judge. He is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia, New York, and New Jersey.