A 2019 graduate of The University of Tulsa’s College of Law, Conor Cleary has been named a recipient of this year’s Maurice Merrill Golden Quill Award from the Oklahoma Bar Association. The award is presented to authors of the best written articles published this year in the Oklahoma Bar Journal and was named in honor of Maurice H. Merrill, a nationally known expert in oil and gas law.
Cleary received the award for authoring “Fractionation or Consolidation? The Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations (2012-2022),” which appeared in the April 2024 issue. He also received the Golden Quill Award in 2022.
Cleary, who received an LLM specializing in American Indian and Indigenous Law from UTulsa, taught for three years as an adjunct professor in the College of Law. He developed a semester-length seminar on the U.S. Supreme Court’s McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, the first law school in the country to offer such a course.
Since 2015, Cleary has worked with the U.S. Department of the Interior, first as a trial attorney and currently as a field solicitor.