Professor Michael C. Duff

Michael C. Duff is Professor of Law at Saint Louis University School of Law. He is also a scholar-member of the Center for Progressive Reform and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He is a fellow of both the American Bar Foundation and the Pound Civil Justice Institute. 

Professor Duff attended college in his late 20s, while simultaneously employed full-time as a union-represented airline ramp worker. The first member of his family to attend college, Professor Duff went straight from the airport tarmac to the Harvard Law School after graduating summa cum laude from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He ultimately graduated from law school in 1995, and went on to work for a small law firm in Maine where he represented injured workers and labor unions. After two years of doing that work, Professor Duff joined the National Labor Relations Board, where he served for ten years as a government labor lawyer in busy regional offices in Philadelphia and Minneapolis. Having never considered a career in legal academia, Professor Duff was invited to apply for a professorship after having a casual breakfast with a former dean of the University of Wyoming College of Law. The rest, as they say, is history.

Professor Duff is now widely considered a national expert on workers’ compensation law and on the National Labor Relations Act. He has written on labor, employment, and personal injury issues, and has been quoted on such matters in various national publications. He is the author (or co-author) of textbooks, treatises, and scholarly articles in these subjects. He is also the founder and co-editor of the highly-regarded Workers’ Compensation Law Professors’ Blog.

Professor Duff anticipates teaching the Saint Louis University School of Law’s courses in Torts, Labor Law, Workers’ Compensation Law, and Evidence. He has also taught Bankruptcy, Employee Benefits Law, Administrative Law, Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Workplace, and Introduction to Law. In 2020, Wyoming students selected Professor Duff professor of the year.

Professor Duff has been inspired throughout his life and law career by the memory of his grandfather, a Harlan County Kentucky coal miner who died of black lung in his early fifties.