PARKER DOUGLAS portrait
  • Adjunct Professor, College Of Law - Dean
  • Adjunct Professor, College Of Law

Biography

Parker Douglas is the Utah Federal Solicitor and Chief of Staff to Attorney General Sean Reyes.  He received his law degree Order of the Coif from the University of Utah, College of Law (2000), where he received the Stephen P. Traynor Award for writing, and also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Utah Law Review. Following law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Michael W. McConnell on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Tena Campbell of the United States District Court for the District of Utah.

Before law school, he attended the University of California, where he was a Regents’ Fellow and Mellon Foundation Fellow, and was awarded his Ph.D. in English with high honors in 1997.  He received his B.A. with a double major in English and History from Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, where in 1988 he graduated summa cum laude and was named the Claremont College’s Outstanding Scholar in English.  While at Pitzer, he was part of a team that made it to the finals of the National Debate Tournament, and he pitched a no-hitter for the Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens.  He was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship upon graduation from Pitzer, supporting independent study abroad, and he also studied at the University of Freiburg, Germany as a Mellon Fellow before entering graduate school. 

As Federal Solicitor he litigates and manages Utah's trial, appellate, multi-state and amicus matters in all federal courts. Before joining the Attorney General’s Office, Dr. Douglas was an Assistant Federal Defender in the Utah Federal Defenders Office, where he handled both trial and appellate matters. Prior to serving as a Federal Defender, he practiced in the Supreme Court and Appellate, Constitutional, and White Collar Crime sections of Latham & Watkins in Washington, D.C., where he primarily handled appellate litigation and argued in the Tenth, Ninth, Sixth, Fifth, Eleventh, and Second Circuits, as well as participated in litigation before the United States Supreme Court.  In addition to working as a Federal Defender, he also practiced at Parsons Behle and Latimer, as a litigation associate, and Hatch, James & Dodge, as both an associate and shareholder, and his civil litigation practice primarily consisted of constitutional, appellate, and commercial litigation.  All told, he has handled well over 200 matters in federal and state courts, tried over 20 cases to a verdict, argued over 30 appeals in the federal courts of appeal, recorded in over 20 published opinions, and submitted amicus briefs or participated in amicus briefing in every federal court of appeal but the Eighth Circuit.

Representative criminal cases include serving as primary defense counsel in United States v. Brian David Mitchell, successfully defending the accused in Utah's first federal criminal trade secret prosecution, representing a Guantanamo detainee, as well as prosecuting white collar and human trafficking crimes, and defending the accused in all manner of federal criminal matters.  Representative civil matters include successfully defending the constitutionality of Utah’s Child Protection Registry, successfully challenging Utah’s ban on Native American initiatives for placement and storage of nuclear waste on their Reservation, defending the constitutionality of Utah's marriage laws, polygamy ban, and "Count My Vote" legislation, defending New York City against claims after 9-11, the current WOTUS litigation, and cases involving preemption, separation of powers, civil rights, trade secrets, and commercial enforcement.