About Stephen C.
Stephen C. Yelderman combines an engineering background and a legal career that moves between courts, agencies and the academy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2000 and stayed on to complete an M.S. there in 2003. He later turned to law and received his J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School in 2010.
After law school he began a sequence of public-sector roles and clerkships. In 2010 he served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to Judge Neil M. Gorsuch. He joined the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2011, working in the Telecommunications & Media Section. Years later he returned to clerking when he served on the Supreme Court of the United States to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch in 2019.
Yelderman moved into academia and, by 2018, held a professorial appointment. His technical training in electrical engineering and subsequent graduate work at Stanford inform his approach to legal questions that touch on technology, communications and regulatory policy. Those threads run through his career entries at the Department of Justice and the federal appellate and Supreme Court chambers where he served.
He is admitted to practice in Illinois and is admitted to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He also holds registration before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. That combination of credentials reflects both a technical background and courtroom experience in federal litigation and administrative venues.
Colleagues and students describe Yelderman as someone who brings technical detail into legal analysis without losing sight of doctrine and procedure. His time at the DOJ exposed him to antitrust and telecommunications policy, while his clerkships placed him at the center of appellate and Supreme Court deliberations. Those experiences inform the courses he teaches and the scholarship he pursues.
He is currently a professor at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame he teaches and researches topics at the intersection of law and technology, and he continues to engage in work that draws on his engineering training and federal litigation experience.
