Featured Madisonian

Michael McConnell, Alumnus

"[I] draw on my Madison experience of reading important texts, thinking about them in light of a broad tradition of Western thought, and writing clearly."

Michael McConnell (JMCD ’76), a well known constitutional scholar, is the Frances Mallery Professor of Law at the Stanford Law School, where he will direct the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.  He stepped down as a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in May of 2009.  Prior to his appointment by President Bush to the court in 2001, he was Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Utah and one of the most distinguished scholars in the fields of Constitutional Law and Theory, with a specialty in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. He has argued nine cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and is widely published in the fields of the church-state relations and the First Amendment.

McConnell is married to JMC alumnus Mary McConnell (IR ’77), a Rhodes scholar. He received his J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School (1979), where he was Order of the Coif and comment editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. He joined the College of Law at the University of Utah in 1997 after teaching at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years, where he served as the William B. Graham Professor of Law.

Before beginning his teaching career, McConnell was assistant to the solicitor general with the U.S. Department of Justice (1983-85), assistant general counsel for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (1981-83), and law clerk to Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan. In 1996, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.