Emilie Kao
Senior Counsel, Vice President of Advocacy Strategy
Emilie Kao serves as senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy for Alliance Defending Freedom. In her role, she works on academic scholarship and coalitions of strategic partners.
She previously served as director of the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society where she co-edited Heritage’s “First Principles on International Human Rights” essay series. Kao also worked at the Office of International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and the United Nations in Geneva. She was an associate at the law firm of Latham and Watkins.
She has testified on human rights before the U.S. Congress, at the U.S. Department of Justice and at the United Nations in Geneva and New York. She taught international human rights as an adjunct professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. She has published extensively on religious freedom and other human rights, including in Texas Review of Law and Politics, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy: Per Curiam, the Hill, Public Discourse, and National Review.
She serves on the Federalist Society Religious Liberties Executive Committee, the Board of Directors of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the Board of Advisors for the Parental Rights Foundation’s Committee on the Constitution.
Kao holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. degree cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She is a member of the Supreme Court Bar and the bar associations of California and the District of Columbia. She speaks Mandarin Chinese.