Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell helps us learn how to navigate the complicated intersection between Christian liberty and national politics by discussing the religious beliefs that led Founding-era Christians to be in the forefront of the movement for religious and civil liberty and republican self-government.

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 (where he is teaching this fall). 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, most recently Carney v. Adams (2020). defending a provision of the Delaware Constitution requiring political balance on that state's courts. He is currently representing the lead challengers to the legality of President Trump’s tariffs. 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 co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Review Board.