Edwin Brown Firmage teaches constitutional law and international law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Hinckley Fellow at Brigham Young University, he graduated with high honors in political science and history. He received a master's degree in history from Brigham Young University. He was National Honors Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School and served on the editorial board of the Chicago Law Review. He received the doctor of law, master of laws, and doctor of jurisprudence degrees from Chicago.

Dr. Firmage served as a White House Fellow on the staff of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, with responsibility for civil rights. In that capacity, he worked with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He also served as United Nations Visiting Scholar, and attended sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York and the arms control negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1970-71.

Following the Geneva meetings Professor Firmage enjoyed a personal audience with His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, in Dharamsala, India, and later had extensive meetings with the Tibetan government-in-exile, and including members of the cabinet, legislative leaders of the government, and the Tibetan Supreme Justice Commission, on matters of constitutional revision and international relations, in September and again in November, 1999.