Judge Michael McConnell to Deliver the McGlinchey Lecture, Monday, February 16, 2009, at 5:00 p.m.

Judge Michael McConnel, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, will deliver this year's McGlinchey Lecture entitled, “Schism and Last Rites In the French Quarter: the Supreme Court's First, and Most Myterious, Free Excercise Case.“  The Lecture will take place Monday, February 16, 2009, at 5:00 p.m. in room 110 of Weinmann Hall. A reception will follow in the Berkett Multipurpose Room.

Judge McConnell is a graduate of Michigan State University (B.A. 1976) and of the University of Chicago Law School (J.D. 1979). Upon graduation from law school, Judge McConnell served as law clerk to Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to Associate Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., on the United States Supreme Court. Judge McConnell later served as Assistant General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, and as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. After this public service, Judge McConnell joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School, where he held the William B. Graham Chair, and later moved to the faculty of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. Judge McConnell has argued eleven cases in the Supreme Court. He has been a Circuit Court Judge since December 2002.

Judge McConnell is a distinguished and prolific constitutional legal scholar. He is co-editor of Religion and the Law (Aspen Pub. Co. 2002) and Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought (Yale Univ. Press 2002). He continues to teach at the Harvard, Stanford, and University of Utah Law Schools.

The McGlinchey Lecture was established in 1996 by the law firm of McGlinchey Stafford, to honor its founder, the late Dermot S. McGlinchey, a distinguished Tulane Law School graduate (L'57). Mr. McGlinchey was a dedicated supporter of the Law School, and his many charitable contributions included service as the chairman of the school's building fund. He devoted much of his life to promoting equal access to the courts, and he revitalized the Louisiana Bar Foundation. Because he was an expert in insurance law and civil litigation, the McGlinchey Lecture is broadly dedicated to the fields of litigation practice, judicial adjudication, and justice under law.