Cole Durham

Cole Durham (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 J. Reuben Clark Law School. 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 is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was a Note Editor of the Harvard Law Review and Managing Editor of the Harvard International Law Journal. He is currently President of the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS), based in Milan, Italy, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion. From 1989 to 1994 he served as Secretary of the American Society of Comparative Law, and he is also an Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Paris—the premier academic organization at the global level in Comparative Law. He served, along with Javier Martínez-Torrón of Complutense University of Madrid, as a General Rapporteur for the topic "Religion and the Secular State" at the 28th International Congress of Comparative Law, held in Washington, D.C., in July 2010. He has served as Chair of both the Comparative Law Section and the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools.

Durham has taught at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University 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 Law School's newly created International Center for Law and Religion Studies. 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.