Sic Semper Tyrannis

Dave Roland is a Christian classical liberal whose calling is to secure the blessings of liberty for as many people possible. He was born in east Tennessee and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, graduating from Huntsville High School in 1996. Dave then spent four years in west Texas at Abilene Christian University, earning degrees in Political Science and Biblical Studies in 2000. His next stop was Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he completed the school’s Law and Religion program and received a law degree and a masters degree in Theology with an emphasis in Ethics.

Mr. Roland has had the good fortune to work for several outstanding organizations. While at Vanderbilt he wrote a series of essays for www.firstamendmentcenter.org, a project of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center. Dave then clerked for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberties, a Washington, D.C., based law firm working to ensure religious freedom all over the world. He left Nashville in January 2004 to work at the national headquarters for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm dedicated to re-establishing constitutional freedoms that have long since been ignored by bureaucrats and the judiciary.

On May 6, 2007, Dave married Jenifer Zeigler in an outdoor ceremony in Bluemont, Virginia. The two met when she was a welfare policy analyst for the Cato Institute, then started dating and fell in love while she was the legislative affairs attorney at the Institute for Justice, coordinating a nationwide campaign to reform the states’ eminent domain laws in the wake of Kelo v. New London. In September 2007, the Rolands moved to Jenifer’s home state of Missouri to work together at the Show-Me Institute, a free-market think tank based in St. Louis. They are now happily living in the STL with their two dogs, Bridget and Molli.