Two Stanford Law School Professors Appointed to Facebook’s New Oversight Board
On May 6, 2020, Facebook announced the appointments of Stanford Law Professors Michael McConnell and Pamela Karlan to the company’s Oversight Board, a new model of content moderation for Facebook and Instagram. McConnell will be a co-chair and Karlan will be a member of the new independent board, joining three other co-chairs and 15 other members selected from around the world to review Facebook’s content decisions and make binding content decisions.
Michael McConnell
Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor, 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.
McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and NYU. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, First Amendment, and interpretive theory and has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially church and state, equal protection, and separation of powers. McConnell’s upcoming book, “The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power Under the Constitution,” will be published by Princeton University Press in late 2020 along with another upcoming book “Establishment of Religion: Neutrality, Accommodation, and Separation,” that will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.
McConnell has argued fifteen cases in the United States Supreme Court, most recently an 8-1 victory in a Takings Clause case on behalf of California raisin farmers. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. and D.C. Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. McConnell 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.
Pamela Karlan
A productive scholar and an award-winning teacher, Pamela S. Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law and co-director of the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission, an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation, and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles.
Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, Karlan was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and the American Law Institute.