Jason Marisam
Jason Marisam will join the Mitchell Hamline faculty this summer as an associate professor of law, one of several new tenure/tenure-track faculty hires at the school. He has been an assistant attorney general in the solicitor general’s division of the Minnesota attorney general’s office since 2016, where he represents and defends the state of Minnesota and its agencies in constitutional, administrative, employment, and tort law cases.
Marisam says the most meaningful work in his career was during the 2020 election, when he represented Minnesota’s secretary of state in several court cases over how the election was administered during the pandemic. “Through this litigation, we were able to put in place measures to help ensure people could vote safely during 2020,” he said. “For me, protecting Minnesotans’ right to safely vote was exciting and important work.”
The issues ranged from whether to require witness signatures on absentee ballots to whether those ballots would count if they were postmarked by Election Day, as opposed to needing to be fully received by Election Day. Marisam and his team at the attorney general’s office won important victories for voting protections. He says he hopes to further research and focus on voting rights and election law in the future, in addition to the work he’s already done in administrative law.
Marisam, 43, grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and didn’t attend law school until five years after graduating from Princeton. He attended Harvard Law, where he was an editor of the law review. “I loved the way law school opened your mind to thinking about the world in a new way,” he said.
One article Marisam wrote while at Harvard was about how the 1918 election was administered during the flu pandemic of the time. “When an election is held during an emergency,” reads one passage in the article, “how can election administration officials and political actors adapt to changing circumstances while also maintaining the integrity of the election?” It was a question Marisam would find himself litigating in court 10 years later, during a pandemic he could have never imagined at that time.
After working as an associate at a firm in Boston after law school, then a two-year fellowship, Marisam moved to Minnesota, where his wife grew up. He was hired to teach at Hamline University School of Law in 2011 and taught for three years before departing the school just before the combination that created Mitchell Hamline. He then clerked for U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen in Minnesota before joining the attorney general’s office.
“I always aimed to return to teaching and academia when the right opportunity came along,” said Marisam. “I love teaching law students and am excited about training a new generation of lawyers at Michell Hamline.”
Marisam has published in the peer-reviewed Election Law Journal and in numerous other law journals, including the Fordham Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Administrative Law Review, Arizona State Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review. He was selected as an Attorney of the Year by Minnesota Lawyer in 2020 and 2021.
Marisam also was a competitive, NCAA All-American fencer and still enjoys the sport when he can find free time amidst raising three children.
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