Michael W. McConnell

Former Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; Law Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School

Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, and his latest book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, is “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience.” McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the Supreme Court, including Carney v. Adams, and was co-counsel in Gonzalez v. Google. He served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been 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. He is Senior of Counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, and is co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.

Debates Featuring Michael W. McConnell

Is Musk’s DOGE Dodging the Law?

With Michael W. McConnell, Laurence Tribe

Public Release Date
March 7, 2025

In the new Trump administration, Elon Musk was named a special government employee and de facto head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which seeks to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse within federal agencies. The specific question we ask this week is not about the politics, the goals, or material benefits or harms of DOGE, but the legality of what it is doing, and how it is doing it. To address this question, we brought together two of the country’s…

Is Musk’s DOGE Dodging the Law?

With Michael W. McConnell, Laurence Tribe

Public Release Date
March 7, 2025

The President Has Usurped the Constitutional Power of Congress

With Adam Cox, Michael W. McConnell, Eric Posner, Carrie Severino

June 8, 2016

The Constitution provides that "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States," and it goes on to grant Congress a robust-and fearsome-list of powers. James Madison assumed that "[i]n republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates," and he cautioned that the legislative department may tend to "draw[] all power into its impetuous vortex." But modern politics and law seem to tell a quite different story. With executive orders, administrative regulations, creative interpretations of…