Michael McConnell

Board Member at Oversight Board

Michael W. McConnell, professor at Richard and Frances Mallery and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where he teaches courses on freedom of speech, press and religion, and is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as Circuit Judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by the Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously been chair professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and is a visiting professor at Harvard and NYU. He has published extensively in the fields of constitutional law and theory, particularly in church and state, equal protection, and exclusion of powers. He is the editor of three books: ‘Religion and the Law’, ‘Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought’, and of ‘The Constitution of the United States’. McConnell has fought fifteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, and served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and DC Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He is a longtime Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management & Budget, Assistant to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board.