Laura Rovner

Laura Rovner is a Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Through the clinic, she supervises law students representing incarcerated clients in constitutional litigation about prison conditions including indefinite solitary confinement, denial of outdoor exercise, lack of adequate medical and mental health care, and restrictions on religious freedom. Professor Rovner lectures and writes frequently about the rights of people incarcerated in prisons and jails. Her scholarship has or will appear in the Virginia Law Review, the American University Law Review, the Utah Law Review, the UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review, and the Correctional Law Reporter, among others. She has provided expert testimony before the European Court of Human Rights about conditions of confinement in the federal supermax prison, served as affiliated faculty with the US-European Criminal Justice Innovation Program in Oslo, Norway, and served on the Colorado legislature’s Work Group on Serious Mental Illness in Long-term Isolated Confinement. She has provided expert commentary on prison and detention issues for national and international media outlets, including The Washington Post, VICE, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and The Marshall Project, and has been solicited as an amicus curiae for cases involving prison law and prisoners’ rights in courts around the country. Her 2018 talk at TEDxMileHigh – What happens to people in solitary confinement – was selected for inclusion on the TED website and has been viewed over 2.4 million times. 

Professor Rovner served as the Ronald V. Yegge Clinical Director of Denver Law’s nationally-ranked clinical program from 2011-2018, during which she was instrumental in creating its Clinical Teaching LLM Program. She is a past member of the Board of Directors of the Clinical Legal Education Association and is a co-chair of CLEA’s Political Interference Group. She has received multiple teaching awards, including the 2016 University of Denver’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest honor for excellence in teaching. Professor Rovner also serves on the litigation committees for the ACLU of Colorado, Disability Law United, and other public interest organizations. For the past ten years, she has also been a member of the Pro Bono Standing Committee for the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, for which she recently co-authored the Committee’s Prison Litigation Handbook. Professor Rovner has received multiple awards in recognition of her commitment to public interest advocacy, including the ACLU of Colorado’s Edward Sherman Award for Outstanding Legal Work on Behalf of Further Civil Liberties in Colorado. 

Professor Rovner graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania before attending Cornell Law School. Following law school, she was awarded a NAPIL Equal Justice Fellowship, which funded her work at the National Association of the Deaf Law Center representing deaf and hard of hearing people in disability rights litigation. She began her teaching career as a graduate fellow in the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University Law Center, where she supervised law students litigating civil rights matters before federal district and appellate courts. 

View CV

• LLM, Advocacy, Georgetown University Law Center, 1995
• JD, Cornell Law School, 1993
• BA, Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 1990

• Admission to practice law (S.D. IN)
• Admission to practice law (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit)
• Admission to practice law (N.D. VA)
• Law license (CO)
• Law license (DC)
• Law license (MD)