Nathan Maxwell most recently worked as an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Federal Public Defender for the District of Arizona. Nathan worked in the Capital Habeas Unit, representing people on death row in Arizona, Utah, and Texas in habeas, clemency, and end stage litigation. Prior to that, Nathan clerked for Judge Terrence Berg in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, and then in Atlanta for Judge Amy Totenberg on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Before clerking, Nathan was the Justice Franklin D. Cleckley Fellow for the West Virginia Innocence Project at the West Virginia University College of Law, where he represented wrongly convicted people in prisons in West Virginia and Mississippi, supervised students in the legal aid clinic, and co-taught a seminar on habeas corpus with Professor Valena Beety.

Nathan Maxwell is a 2016 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, where he was awarded the 2015 2L Public Service Award, the 2015 Norval Morris Public Interest Fellowship, and the 2016 James C. Hormel Public Service Award. Nathan also received a graduate certificate from the Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, where he was awarded the 2014-2015 Ray E. Brown Fellowship and the 2015-2016 Arthur Quern Fellowship. Nathan received a Bachelor of Science in Human Health Studies from Arizona State University in 2008. Prior to law school, Nathan worked as an outreach specialist at the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS (formerly Body Positive), as a case manager for adults living with serious mental illnesses, and as the coordinator for a program seeking to improve physical health outcomes for adults living with serious mental illnesses and chronic diseases.