Courses Offered:

Torts
Federal Courts
Constitutional Law
Insurance
Constitutional Litigation

Professional Biographical Information:

Michael L. Wells joined the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1978 and, in 2004, was named the holder of the Marion and W. Colquitt Carter Chair in Tort and Insurance Law after occupying a prestigious J. Alton Hosch professorship for 13 years. He specializes in torts, federal courts and constitutional litigation.

His recent scholarship includes a new edition of Constitutional Torts (with professors Tom Eaton and Sheldon Nahmod) and Constitutional Remedies (with Professor Eaton). He has also published numerous articles in such leading journals as the Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Georgia Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, Constitutional Commentary and Yale Journal of International Law. Select recent articles include: "International Norms in Constitutional Law" in the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law (2004), "Proximate Cause and the American Law Institute: The False Choice Between the 'Direct Consequences' Test and the 'Risk Standard'" in the University of Richmond Law Review (2003), "Article II and the Florida Election Case" in the Maryland Law Review (2002), "Were There Adequate State Grounds in Bush v. Gore" in Constitutional Commentary (2001), and "Section 1983, The First Amendment and Public Employee Speech: Shaping the Right to Fit the Remedy (and Vice Versa)" in the Georgia Law Review (2001).

Wells is fluent in French and has served as a visiting professor at the University of Lyon (III) in Lyon, France, on six occasions and as a professor in the Duke-Geneva Institute in Transactional Law. He is a member of the American Law Institute.

Wells earned bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Virginia, where he served as articles editor for the Virginia Law Review. He clerked for Judge John D. Butzner Jr. of the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and practiced with the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., for two years before joining the law faculty at the University of Georgia.  He has also served as a visiting professor at the College of William & Mary and Boston University, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence, France.