Jenn Mascott

Jenn’s career has spanned all three branches of federal government including three appointments in the Executive Branch. Earlier in her career, she was press secretary and communications director for two U.S. House members and a deputy press secretary in a U.S. Senate leadership office. More recently, she served as a Supreme Court Contributor for NBC News during the 2023-24 Supreme Court Term. She is a subject-matter expert on the regulatory process, and the legal theory and policy behind governmental actions impacting highly regulated industries across fields such as energy, health care, and financial services.

In addition to managing Adfero on behalf of the trust established by her late husband, Jeff Mascott, who founded the firm in 2005, Jenn holds an appointment as tenured associate professor of law at Catholic University. There she founded the Separation of Powers Institute and Litigation Clinic to research and provide analysis on constitutional constraints impacting federal regulatory and legislative power. Previously, she was an assistant professor at George Mason’s Scalia Law School and codirector of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. In those capacities, Jenn has provided regular briefings for U.S. Senate and House legal and policy staff on regulatory reform, the constitutional division of power between the executive and legislative branches, and the impact of key Supreme Court decisions on congressional authority.

In her legal academic roles, Jenn routinely talks with national media and trade press. She has appeared on NBC's Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, the Saturday Today Show, NBC Special Report with both Savannah Guthrie and Lester Holt, PBS NewsHour, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News's Ingraham Angle, The Tucker Carlson Show, and Late Night with Shannon Bream. She has published in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, and has been quoted or cited by The New York Times, the AP, Bloomberg, Reuters, USA Today, and the National Law Journal, among other publications. She also frequently testifies in Congress, including having testified in the confirmation hearings for two Supreme Court justices.

Jenn is the coauthor of Administrative Law: Cases and Materials, 9th ed., Aspen Publishing, a textbook on regulatory procedures and the scope and structure of governmental power impacting both private actors and highly regulated industries. Her article, “Who are Officers of the United States?,” published by the Stanford Law Review in 2018, has been cited extensively by the U.S. Supreme Court and federal circuit courts. The article analyzes the historically accurate scope of the category of federal officers subject to the Appointments Clause, the principal constitutional constraint on the appointment of executive branch officials and the structure of the Executive Branch. Jenn’s historical analysis was adopted by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas in a 2018 concurring opinion in litigation involving the Securities and Exchange Commission, in which the two Justices indicated the article’s research describes the legally accurate, originalist meaning of the Clause.