Rick A. Griffin pursued an interest in civil rights and completed his Juris Doctor at the University of Mississippi in 1996. He also completed law courses at the University of Cambridge and J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University (BYU). In 2006, Griffin earned a Ph.D. at BYU, where he completed studies in constitutional law and education law, and was an Associate Editor of the Education and Law Journal. In 2007, he was accepted to the prestigious Master of Laws (LL.M.) program at the University of California, Berkeley, where he excelled in constitutional law, judicial politics, and early modern Anglo-American constitutional history and political thought, and was one of a few selected from an international pool of applicants to the highly-restricted Doctor of the Science of Law (J.S.D.) program.

Dr. Griffin has taught constitutionally-related courses at BYU, and at UVU, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science. His primary research interests are in constitutional law, government, history and theory; judicial politics; and the U. S. Supreme Court. He has written on issues pertaining to constitutional law, disability law, and education law and policy, and is currently writing an article on Chief Justice John Jay and a book on President George Washington. Dr. Griffin is the recipient of several teaching awards, and was listed by Utah Valley Magazine as one of the “50 Most Fabulous People of 2012.”