College of Law

Faculty and Staff

B.A., West Chester University of Pennsylvania (1991), Philosophy, summa cum laude
J.D., Harvard Law School (1995)

Email: michael.duff@uwyo.edu
Phone: (307) 766-5319
Office: 211 College of Law

Publications
Presentations
CV
Media Appearances
Professor Duff's Workers Compensation Blog
Law Professor Group Workers Compensation Blog

Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 1:00 - 3:30 p.m.

Michael C. Duff, a Professor at the College of Law since 2006, is a fellow of the College of Workers’ Compensation Lawyers and Vice Chair of the Workers’ Compensation Committee of the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section. Professor Duff is also a fellow of both the American Bar Foundation and the Pound Civil Justice Institute. In 2017, Professor Duff was elected a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Professor Duff is widely considered one of the leading national experts on workers’ compensation systems and is quoted frequently by the national press. He has written extensively on various complex labor and employment matters, including preemption issues emerging from the interplay of Title I of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and state workers’ compensation systems. He is also a nationally recognized expert and commentator on labor issues arising from the National Labor Relations Act and has been quoted on labor law matters in various national publications including the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Huffington Post, the Nation, ThinkProgress, and In These Times. Professor Duff  is the author of a workers’ compensation textbook and the co-author of a labor law textbook, both published by Carolina Academic Press.

Professor Duff teaches the College of Law’s courses in Torts I, Labor Law, Workers’ Compensation Law, and Employee Benefits Law. He has also taught Administrative Law, Evidence, Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Workplace, Introduction to Law, and it is anticipated that he will teach the College of Law’s Bankruptcy course beginning in Spring Semester 2019.  An experienced legal practitioner, Professor Duff spent nearly a decade working as an attorney, adjudicative official, and investigator in various National Labor Relations Board offices immediately prior to joining the College of Law’s faculty. Before engaging in federal government law practice, Professor Duff worked for two years as an associate attorney in a high-volume, progressive law firm in Maine—McTeague, Higbee & MacAdam—where he represented injured workers and labor unions.

In his work life preceding the study of the law, Professor Duff was for eleven years a Teamsters shop steward and blue-collar ramp service worker in the airline industry, leaving that occupation in 1992 to study labor law at the Harvard Law School.

Professor Duff enjoys playing his Martin, Seagull, and Guild guitars but should have listened more closely to his late dad (a jazz guitarist) about the virtues of maintaining technically precise hand positions.

Teaching: Labor Law, Torts I, Workers' Compensation Law, Employee Benefits