Michael W. McConnell

Michael William McConnell (born May 18, 1955) is an American jurist who served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2002 to 2009. Since 2009, McConnell has been a professor and Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and Senior Of Counsel to the Litigation Practice Group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In May 2020, Facebook appointed him to its content oversight board. In 2020, McConnell published ''The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power under the Constitution'' under Princeton University Press.

Biography

McConnell graduated from Michigan State University's James Madison College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976. He received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Chicago Law School in 1979, where he was an editor of the ''University of Chicago Law Review''.

After law school, McConnell was a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1979 to 1980 and for U.S. Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan Jr., from 1980 to 1981. He was an assistant general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1983 and an assistant to the Solicitor General from 1983 to 1985. From 1985 to 1996 McConnell was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, where he brought Barack Obama on a fellowship after being impressed with a suggestion Obama, the ''Harvard Law Review'' president, had made about one of McConnell's articles. He has been a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and the New York University School of Law.

Scholarship

As a law professor, McConnell has published a variety of legal articles and edited several books. As a lawyer, he has argued cases in federal courts of appeals and before the Supreme Court, including a 5–4 victory in '' Rosenberger v. University of Virginia''. He is widely regarded as one of the preeminent constitutional law scholars on the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.Statement
of Senator Orrin Hatch, September 18, 2002

In 1996, McConnell signed a statement supporting a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, which read, "Abortion kills 1.5 million innocent human beings in America every year. ... We believe that the abortion license is a critical factor in America's virtue deficit."

As a respected constitutional scholar during his law school tenure, McConnell contended that originalism is consistent with the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation decision ''Brown v. Board of Education'', as opposed to critics of originalism who argue that they are inconsistent. He has likewise argued that the Court's decision in ''Bolling v. Sharpe'' was correct but should have been reached on other grounds, as Congress never "required that the schools of the District of Columbia be segregated."

McConnell was critical of the Supreme Court's decision in ''Bush v. Gore'':

I imagine that Gov. Bush and his supporters will put on a brave face and defend this decision, but I cannot imagine that there is much joy in Austin tonight. The Supreme Court, with all the prestige of its position in American public life, could have brought closure to this matter. But instead, by straddling the fence, the court has produced a combination of holdings that can please no one.

McConnell expressed skepticism on First Amendment grounds about restrictions on religious exercise imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, McConnell'
argument
that Trump could be tried by the Senate after he left office because the second impeachment occurred while he was in office was frequently cited in Senate debates and in th

In 2025, McConnell co-authored, with Joshua Claybourn, a high-profile ''amici curiae'' brief filed in '' V.O.S. Selections, Inc. v. Trump'', a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's tariff and import tax program. The brief brought together a prominent coalition "rarely seen" consistenting of leading constitutional scholars, former judges, and senior public officials from across the political spectrum. Signatories included Steven Calabresi, co-founder of the Federalist Society; constitutional scholar Richard Epstein; former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former U.S. Senators George Allen, John Danforth, and Chuck Hagel

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