Stephen Mortellaro

Stephen Mortellaro has taught at The George Washington University Law School since 2017. Between 2017 and 2019, Professor Mortellaro taught first-year legal writing courses as a Professorial Lecturer in Law while working as a voting rights attorney. In 2019, Professor Mortellaro began teaching the Upper-Level Writing, Thesis I, and Thesis II courses at GW Law while simultaneously joining the full-time faculty at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. There, he taught first-year lawyering courses and its upper-level Writing Fellows Seminar, directed the law school’s Writing Center, co-developed a new lawyering skills curriculum, and managed the other professors teaching in the lawyering program. Professor Mortellaro was voted runner-up for Maryland Carey Law’s Professor of the Year in 2020-21. In 2021, Professor Mortellaro joined the GW Law faculty full-time as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Fundamentals of Lawyering Program.

Before his career in law teaching, Professor Mortellaro practiced voting rights law at civil rights organizations including FairVote, Project Vote, and Voters Initiative. His work included enforcing the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, advocating for election reform legislation, and managing national voter education projects. He was also appointed to the Montgomery County Right to Vote Task Force and served from 2013 to 2015. In addition to his voting rights work, Professor Mortellaro was a Policy Associate for the Montgomery County Renters Alliance. Before entering law practice, he worked as an educational and environmental lobbyist in Florida. Throughout his career, he has served on several nonprofit and community organization boards. Professor Mortellaro's scholarly interests include voting rights and political law, civil rights law, legal writing, lawyer wellness, and legal education. His recent scholarship has focused on the political rights of renters, noncitizen suffrage, and federalism-based constraints on Congress's ability to disenfranchise voters.