2026 Waggener Hall of Fame

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 United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory. His book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2020, based on the Tanner Lectures in Human Values, which he delivered at Princeton in 2019. His book, co-authored with Nathan Chapman, “Agreeing to Disagree: How the Establishment Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of Conscience,” was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. He has also co-written casebooks in Constitutional Law and Religion and the First Amendment. McConnell has argued sixteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, and was counsel of record for the private plaintiffs in the recent challenge to the legality of President Trump’s tariffs, Learning Resources v. Trump. He earned his B.A. from Michigan State University and his J.D. from University of Chicago, and has received honorary degrees from Notre Dame University and Michigan State. He served as 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 a member of Meta’s Oversight Review Board, serving as co-chair from 2020-2025.