Product Code Database
W. Cole Durham Jr. (born February 26, 1948) is an American educator. He is Susa Young Gates University Professor of Law and director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (ICLRS) at Brigham Young University's (BYU) J. Reuben Clark Law School (JRCLS). He is an internationally active specialist in religious freedom law, involved in comparative law scholarship, with a special emphasis on comparative constitutional law. In January 2009, the First Freedom Center granted him the International First Freedom Award, in Richmond, Virginia.
Durham has taught at BYU's JRCLS since 1976. He was awarded the honorary designation of University Professor there in the fall of 1999. On January 1, 2000, he was named director of the ICLRS within the JRCLS. Since 1994, Durham has been a Recurring Visiting professor of law at Central European University in Budapest, where he teaches comparative constitutional law to students from throughout Eastern Europe, and increasingly from Asia and Africa as well. He has been a guest professor in Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and at the University of Vienna.
Durham also works on laws governing the civil society sector, having served as chairman of the Board of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law International Center for Not-for-Profit Law in Washington, D.C., and also served on its board for several years. Durham has played a role in advising governments throughout much of the former socialist bloc on constitutional provisions and legislation dealing with criminal law and procedure, court structure, general constitutional issues, and the law of associations, including particularly religious associations. Durham has studied religious law in many parts of eastern Europe, and in countries such as Bulgaria he made public statements intended to halt the enactment of laws that would have negative effects on religious liberty. article from a Sofia paper including such statements from Durham Durham has helped organize technical assistance to law reform projects and comparative law conferences in many countries around the world.This has included consultations on constitutional issues and laws in Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Estonia, France, Georgia, Hungary, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Peru, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Samoa, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Ukraine, and Vietnam. In the United States, Durham organized a series of conferences http://www.iclrs.org on comparative law issues at BYU, which have brought together some 850 scholars and experts dealing with comparative constitutional law themes from more than 100 countries.
Durham has testified before the U.S. Congress on religious intolerance in Europe and on the Religious Liberty Protection Act.
In the wake of the United States Supreme Court ruling in Employment Division v. Smith, Durham testified to the House Judiciary Committee on its negative effects. "Apostle testifies for religious freedom bill", Church News, June 27, 1998.
In March 2010, Durham testified via video conference during hearings before the Constitutional Court of Indonesia concerning proposed revision of Indonesia's 1965 blasphemy law.
In June 2011, Durham and his ICLRS colleagues filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in the U.S. Supreme Court case concerning the hiring practices of a Lutheran church school. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC
|
|
