W. Cole Durham, Jr.

W. Cole Durham, Jr. "is the director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University. Multiple honors have come to him as director of the Center, including a university professorship, appointment as co-chair of the OSCE Advisory Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief, and service as vice president of the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Professor Durham has been heavily involved in comparative constitutional law and church-state relations throughout his career. He has published widely on Comparative Law, currently serves as the chair of both the Comparative Law Section and the Law and Religion Section of the American Association of Law Schools, and is a member of several U.S. and international advisory boards dealing with religious freedom and church-state relations."

"From 1989 to 1994, he served as the Secretary of the American Society of Comparative Law, and was recently named an Associate Member of the prestigious International Academy of Comparative Law in Paris—the premier organization at the global level in comparative law. He has also served as Chair of both the Comparative Law Section and the Law and Religion Section of the American Association of Law Schools. He has taught at the Brigham Young University Law School since 1976, and was awarded the honorary designation of University Professor there in the fall of 1999. As of January 1, 2000, he was appointed to be the Director of the BYU International Center for Law and Religion Studies.

"Professor Durham has been particularly active in matters involving religious freedom and church-state relations. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Academy for Freedom of Religion and Belief, and serves as an advisory member of Church-State centers at DePaul and Baylor Universities. He is also a member of the Board of the International Religious Liberty Association, and of the International Advisory Board of the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief. Over the past few years, Professor Durham’s involvement in these organizations has enabled him to play an active role in advising governments throughout much of the former socialist bloc on laws dealing with religious freedom and religious associations, and more generally on developing the legal infrastructure for the not-for-profit sector in these countries. He assisted with the International Academy’s efforts in organizing the first conference of heads of church-state offices for all the former socialist bloc countries in Kiev, Ukraine in September, 1996 and also attended a follow-up meeting organized by the International Religious Liberty Association in March, 1997. He has been actively involved in consultations on laws dealing with religious freedom and religious associations in Russia, Ukraine, Albania, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia, and has also been heavily involved in work on a law for not-for-profit organizations in Bulgaria. He served as a public member of the U.S. Delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Human Dimension Seminar on Constitutional, Legal and Administrative Aspects of the Freedom of Religion held in Warsaw, Poland from April 16-19, 1996, and has served since on the Advisory Panel of Experts on Freedom of Religion or Belief advising the OSCE’s Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights on religion matters since that time. He also served until June, 1999 as the Chairman of the Board of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law in Washington, D.C., which has been involved in a wide array of law reform efforts in the not-for-profit sector in Eastern Europe, the CIS, and other parts of the world.

"At home, Professor Durham has organized a series of conferences on religious freedom issues at Brigham Young University and at other institutions with church-state programs which have brought leading figures in the church-state field from around the globe to Provo, Utah and other U.S. sites. He has recently published (with Noel Reynolds) a book entitled Religious Liberty in Western Thought, and is the author of numerous law review articles dealing with religious liberty and other comparative law themes. Over the past three years, he has testified before Congress in hearings on religious intolerance in Europe and on the proposed Religious Liberty Protection Act."