CLIFFORD ROSKY portrait
  • Professor, College Of Law - Dean
  • Professor, College Of Law

Education

  • J.D., Law, Yale Law School
  • B.A., Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College, summa cum laude

Biography

Clifford Rosky is a professor of law at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, where he teaches courses on constitutional law, criminal law, and mindfulness.  His recent scholarship includes "Mindful Lawyering: a Pilot Study on Mindfulness Training for Law Students," 13 Mindfulness 2347 (2022), a peer-reviewed study of the well-being of students in his mindfulness course.

Rosky has spent 15 years working as a scholar of, and advocate for, LGBTQ rights.  During this period, he has received multiple awards for his teaching and pro bono service, and he is a two-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best legal scholarship on sexuality and gender published each year.  In 2015, he received the Equality Award from the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest civil rights organization working to achieve equality for LGBTQ people. He has provided legal commentary on LGBTQ rights to many press outlets, including the N.Y. TimesWashington PostL.A. TimesAssociated Press, Agence France-PressThe EconomistNational Public Radio, Newsweek and Time.

Rosky has helped draft, negotiate, and secure the passage of five Utah laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination in bullying, conversion therapy, hate crimes, education, employment, and housing.  In addition, he has served as an expert witness and counsel of record in the country's first lawsuits successfully challenging the constitutionality of statewide anti-LGBTQ curriculum laws in Arizona, South Carolina, and Utah.  In 2022, he served on the expert panel revising "Ending Conversion Therapy: Supporting LGBTQ Youth," a report issued by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In recent years, Rosky has begun teaching a new course called Mindful Lawyering, which examines the relationship between the practice of meditation and the practice of law.  Rosky has been practicing meditation for more than 20 years, both individually and on silent meditation retreats.  He has served in leadership roles with the Utah State Bar Well-Being Committee, the Mindfulness in Law Society, and the Balance and Well-Being Section of the American Association of Law Schools.  He is certified as a professional mindfulness teacher by the International Mindfulness Teachers Association and trained as a mindfulness facilitator by the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.