Christine M. Durham | |
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Portrait of Justice Durham
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Associate Justice of the Utah Supreme Court | |
Assumed office 1982 |
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Nominated by | Scott M. Matheson |
Personal details | |
Born |
United States |
August 3, 1945
Alma mater |
Wellesley College Duke University School of Law |
Christine Meaders Durham (born August 3, 1945) is an Associate Justice on the Utah Supreme Court.
Durham is the oldest child of three, and she grew up in Southern California. When she was young, she aspired to be a novelist. Durham’s father initially worked for the IRS in Washington, D. C., and in 1960 he became a US Department of Treasury attaché at the Paris Embassy and the family went to French schools and learned French.
In the early 1960s, Durham moved to New England to attend Wellesley College, a women’s college, where she met her husband, George Durham. It was also at this time that she received her patriarchal blessing from the Boston Stake patriarch (she was and is a Mormon), that said things that had a role in her decision to study law. She graduated in 1967 with an A.B. with Honors. She then went to Boston College for law to be near her husband while he finished his undergraduate studies at Harvard. When he was accepted to Duke Medical School, Durham transferred to Duke Law School. She graduated from Duke Law School in 1971.
She is now on the Board of Trustees of Duke University, where she is on the Executive Committee and chairs the Faculty, Graduate and Professional Schools Affairs and Honorary Degree Committees. For a personal account of her early life, see Mormon Women: Portraits and Conversations by James N. Kimball and Kent Miles.
Durham was an Instructor of Legal Medicine at Duke University Medical School immediately after she graduated from law school in 1971 until 1973. She was admitted to the North Carolina State Bar in 1971. She had a general law practice while in North Carolina, representing private clients in domestic law, employment law, and personal injury law work. She also did title law work and criminal defense work off of the county indigency list. While in North Carolina, she was a legal consultant for the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. She and her husband moved to Utah in 1973, where she became an Adjunct Professor of Law at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School until 1978. At this time she formed a partnership with two other lawyers and founded the law firm of Johnson, Durham, & Moxley. In 1980, the firm merged with a larger firm in Salt Lake City. She also occasionally teaches constitutional law at the University of Utah’s S. J. Quinney College of Law.