Mark E. Chopko

B.S. summa cum laude, University of Scranton; J.D. cum laude, Cornell. Mark E. Chopko is currently partner and Chair of the Nonprofit and Religious Organizations Practice Group at Stradley, Ronon in Washington. In that capacity he represents a variety of organizations in complex and constitutional litigation and a wide array of business and other issues. For more than 20 years he was the General Counsel to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, an organization which provides a framework by which the Catholic Bishops of the United States can address important issues of national policy and matters of Church life. His more than fifty articles address a variety of topics, e.g., church-state affairs; education; biomedical issues; and liability issues. Professor Chopko has lectured on liability trends, church-state relations, legal ethics for church lawyers, assisted suicide and a variety of other topics, at conferences hosted by bar associations and universities, Catholic lawyer guilds and national religious entities. In 2002, he was profiled as a “corporate counsel of the week” in the National Law Journal for his work on the Bishops’ Charter for Child Protection, and in Supreme Court victories on vouchers and the death penalty. His homiletic on lawyering “Private Lives and Public Virtue” was published in the Texas Tech Law Review and selected for republication in Can a Good Christian Be a Good Lawyer? (Baker & Floyd eds. 1998). He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Freedom of Religion and Belief. He was elected an honorary member of the Church Law Society of the Czech Republic. He serves as an Advisor to a project of the American Law Institute restating the law of nonprofit institutions.