C. Ellen Connally served as a law clerk for the 8th District Court of Appeals and magistrate for  the Cuyahoga County Probate Court before her election to the Cleveland Municipal Court in 1980, where she served until 2004. In that election she became the first black woman in Ohio to be elected judge without first being appointed.

She holds a BS from Bowling Green State University, a JD and MA from Cleveland State University and is all but dissertation for a PhD in history from the University of Akron. In 2010 she was elected to the Cuyahoga County Council and was elected the first president of the Council. She  served as the Foreman of the Grand Jury, Assistant Professor of History at Ursuline College; Visiting and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Akron College of Law and Special Prosecutor for the City of Cleveland. Currently she is the Vice President of the Board of Trustees of Community Action Against Addiction; Vice President of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission; Past President of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table and  Board Member  of the Cleveland Baseball Heritage Museum, The Breast Cancer Fund of Ohio, The African Americans Cultural Garden of Cleveland and the Ohio History Connection. She is past president of the Board of Trustees of Bowling Green State University and is an honorary member of the Cleveland-Marshall College of law Alumni Association.

Judge Connally is a frequent contributor to Cool Cleveland and is published is several historical and legal journals, including the Journal of Supreme Court History, the University of Akron Law School Law Review and Oxford University Press. She is a frequent lecturer of on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and helps conduct seminars for lawyers on the legal issues that would have arisen had Lee Harvey Oswald gone to trial for the death of the president.