Michael W. McConnell

Michael William McConnell (born May 18, 1955 in Louisville, Kentucky) is a constitutional law scholar who served as a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2002 until 2009. Since 2009, Judge McConnell has served as Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Background

McConnell graduated from Michigan State University's James Madison College in 1976. McConnell received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1979, where he served on law review. He was a law clerk for James Skelly Wright, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 1979–1980, and for Associate Justice William Brennan, Supreme Court of the United States, 1980-1981. He was an assistant general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget, 1981–1983, and an assistant to the Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, 1983-1985. McConnell was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, 1985–1996, where he brought Harvard Law graduate Barack Obama on a fellowship after being impressed with a suggestion Obama, then Harvard Law Review president, had made on one of McConnell's articles. McConnell has been professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law since 1997 and has been...
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