Elizabeth A. Clark – Associate Director and Regional Advisor for Europe, International Center for Law and Religion Studies

As Associate Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies, and the Center’s Regional Advisor for Europe, Elizabeth Clark has co-organized and taken part in dozens of conferences and academic projects with other scholars and with government leaders from around the world. She has from the beginning been a primary organizer of the annual International Law and Religion Symposium at Brigham Young University. She has taken part in drafting commentaries and legal analyses of pending legislation and developments affecting religious freedom, and has assisted in drafting amicus briefs on international religious freedom issues for the U.S. Supreme Court, including the Center’s brief in the landmark 2012 case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC.

Before joining the Center, Clark was an associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Mayer, Brown & Platt, where she was a member of the Appellate and Supreme Court Litigation Group. She also clerked for Judge J. Clifford Wallace on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Clark graduated summa cum laude from the BYU Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the BYU Law Review.

Drawing on her multilingual talents in Russian, Czech, German, and French, Clark has been active in writing and lecturing on church-state and comparative law topics. She has taught classes on Comparative Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, International Human Rights, and European Union law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University. She has published numerous articles and chapters on church-state issues and has been an associate editor of three major books: Facilitating Freedom of Religion and Belief and two books on law and religion in post-Communist Europe. Clark has also testified before Congress on religious freedom issues.