Professor Michael S. McGinniss

Michael S. McGinniss is Professor of Law and J. Philip Johnson Faculty Fellow at the University of North Dakota School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 2010 and served as the Dean from 2019 to 2022. In 2024-2025, he is teaching Professional Responsibility, Federal Courts, and Advanced Legal Ethics; and he serves as Faculty Advisor for the North Dakota Law Review and the UND Law Federalist Society student chapter. He also served for three years as a founding co-coordinator for the UND School of Law’s innovative team-taught first-year course, Professional Foundations.  

In June 2022, Professor McGinniss received from the State Bar Association of North Dakota (SBAND) its Distinguished Service Award, the highest and most prestigious honor given by the Association. This Award, which is not given every year, is selected by the SBAND Board of Governors to recognize the efforts of its most outstanding members, and it honors a member of the profession who has provided outstanding service to the state and legal community over an extended career.  Professor McGinniss serves the Chair of the North Dakota Joint Committee on Attorney Standards, where he previously served for nine years (2012-2020) as a member and for two years as Chair.  While UND Law Dean, he was an active member of the SBAND Board of Governors (2019-2022). He also serves as Chair of the Operations Committee for the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of North Dakota, and has served as President of the Randy H. Lee American Inn of Court.   In 2017, he was elected as a member of the American Law Institute, "the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law." He is a member of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies and its Religious Liberties and Free Speech and Election Law Practice Groups; and in 2024, he was selected to serve on the Executive Committee of its Professional Responsibility & Legal Education Practice Group. 

Professor McGinniss’ research and scholarship interests to date have focused on primarily on questions concerning the professional, ethical, and moral responsibilities of lawyers and judges. His most recent law review article, Declaring Independence to Secure Integrity: The Supreme Court Justices' Code of Conduct, was published in 2024 in the Federalist Society Review. He has published Expressing Conscience with Candor: Saint Thomas More and First Freedoms in the Legal Profession in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, which is Harvard Law’s top-ranked specialty journal. His invited book chapter Advice in the Lawyer-Client Relationship was published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Handbook of Advice. He also presented this research in the 2018 Mart Vogel Lecture on Professionalism and Legal Ethics at the SBAND Annual Meeting in Bismarck. He presented his article The Character of Codes: Preserving Spaces for Personal Integrity in Lawyer Regulation, 29 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 559 (2016) at the 2016 Symposium of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. His 2016 Vogel Lecture featured his lead article Breaking Faith: Machiavelli and Moral Risks in Lawyer Negotiation, 91 N.R. L. Rev. 247 (2015). He authored and published A Tribute to Justice Antonin Scalia, 92 N.D. L. Rev. 1 (2016), based on remarks he presented at a Federalist Society event at the School of Law in April 2016. His 2013 article Virtue and Advice: Socratic Perspectives on Lawyer Independence and Moral Counseling of Clients was selected to be the lead article in Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Texas A&M Law Review. His essay Apprenticing for a Flourishing Life in the Law: The Virtues of Judicial Clerkships appeared in the March/April 2015 issue of the American Inns of Court’s flagship publication, The Bencher.  Shortly after joining the UND School of Law faculty, he presented the 2011 Vogel Lecture, entitled Virtue Ethics, Earnestness, and the Deciding Lawyer: Human Flourishing in a Legal Community. His article based on the Lecture was subsequently published in 87 N.D. L. Rev. 19 (2011). In 2013, his article entitled Sending the Message: Using Technology to Support Judicial Reporting of Lawyer Misconduct to State Disciplinary Agencies was published in the Journal of the Professional Lawyer, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility.  He has also published legal scholarship addressing the regulation of multi-jurisdictional practice and the unauthorized practice of law.

Professor McGinniss earned a Bachelor of Arts in English (summa cum laude and first in his class) at Washington College. He received his legal education at the College of William & Mary, Marshall-Wythe School of Law, where he graduated third in his class and was inducted into the Order of the Coif. Upon graduation from law school, he served as the law clerk for the Honorable Randy J. Holland of the Supreme Court of Delaware. He then was associated for four years with the Delaware law firm Potter Anderson & Corroon LLP, where his practice focused on intellectual property litigation in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. In 1998, the Supreme Court of Delaware appointed Professor McGinniss to its Office of Disciplinary Counsel. During his twelve years of service as Disciplinary Counsel, he was responsible for the evaluation, investigation, and prosecution of lawyer disciplinary matters before the Court and its Board on Professional Responsibility. He was also responsible for evaluating, investigating and prosecuting matters involving the unauthorized practice of law by non-lawyers, and presenting hearings before the Board of Bar Examiners involving the character and fitness of applicants to the Delaware Bar. He is a member of the bars of North Dakota; Delaware and the United States District Court for the District of Delaware (inactive); and the United States Supreme Court.

In 2022, Bishop John T. Folda, Diocese of Fargo, appointed Professor McGinniss to the Board of Directors of the North Dakota Catholic Conference. In 2013, he received a UND Foundation North Dakota Spirit Faculty Achievement Award, and he has twice been nominated for the UND Outstanding Graduate or Professional Teaching Award (2013 and 2023) and once for the Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award (2014). He was initiated as an Honorary Member of Phi Delta Phi, Bruce Inn in March 2018, and he has been honored by our students selecting him as the Graduation Banquet speaker in 2012, 2019, and 2022, and as a Commencement Hooder each May 2012 through 2019, and in May 2024.  

Professor McGinniss and his wife Maureen are parishioners of St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Grand Forks, ND, where they reside.