Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University

Panelists:     

Scott Rafferty ’76 *76
Attorney

Terri Sewell ’86
United States Representative, Alabama’s 7th Congressional District

Melissa Kessler ’06
Assistant Deputy Attorney General, Colorado Attorney General’s Office

Sophia Cai ’21
White House Reporter, Politico

PANELISTS

Scott Rafferty ’76 *76
Scott Rafferty practices administrative and election law in California. His recent practice has focused on minority voting rights. He co-founded Neighborhood Elections Now, an organization that uses state law to create districts that increase the influence of Latino, Asian and Black communities. Rafferty has represented candidates during the ballot counting process in close races, including the 2006 Montana election where 3,562 votes changed control of the U.S. Senate. After graduation, he attended Yale Law School, where he was named a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the privatization of British Telecom. Rafferty served as counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Telecommunications subcommittee during the AT&T divestiture, and as deputy director of the Administrative Conference of the United States during the Obama administration. He also worked as an attorney at O’Melveny and as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.

Terri Sewell ’86
Now in her eighth term, Terri Sewell is the first Black woman to serve in the Alabama congressional delegation. Sewell sits on the House Ways and Means Committee and the Committee on House Administration. During her time in Congress, she has held several leadership positions, including freshman class president in the 112th Congress and chief deputy whip in the 119th. She also serves on the Steering and Policy Committee that sets the policy direction of the Democratic Caucus and is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition. She is co-chair of the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus, vice-chair of the Congressional HBCU Caucus and co-chair of the Rural Caucus. A proud product of Alabama’s rural Black Belt, Sewell is an honors graduate of Princeton (A.B.) and Oxford University in England (MLitt) and received her juris doctorate from Harvard Law School.

Melissa Kessler ’06
Melissa Kessler is a senior executive leader of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office overseeing the state’s Consumer Protection practice. Among many roles, Kessler supervises election-related matters, including enforcement of the Colorado Voting Rights Act. Prior to her role with the attorney general, Kessler was chief legal officer to the Colorado secretary of state, where she oversaw numerous novel legal issues, including two voting-related U.S. Supreme Court cases, legislative redistricting, various ballot-access matters, election-security issues and election access during COVID. She moved to Colorado following a career with the U.S. Department of Justice and a federal clerkship in the Eastern District of California. Kessler earned her juris doctorate from the William & Mary Law School and her A.B. in politics from Princeton.

Sophia Cai ’21
Sophia Cai is a White House reporter at Politico and co-author of West Wing Playbook, Politico’s daily newsletter on the inner workings of the White House and Donald Trump’s unprecedented overhaul of the federal government. She is also building out Politico’s politics-of-sports coverage, reporting on preparations for the FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Before joining Politico, Cai covered the 2024 presidential campaign for Axios, traveling nationwide to report on Trump’s bid to return to the White House and the broader GOP primary field. She previously reported on the White House and Congress for Bloomberg News, where she was part of the team covering Trump’s last-minute airlift to Walter Reed, the 2020 election and the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. She currently serves on the board of the Washington Press Club Foundation.