Mark E. Burns serves as Civil Deputy Attorney General for the Office of the Utah Attorney General, drawing on more than three decades of public law experience and prior division leadership to support the Office’s civil work on behalf of State agencies and Utahns. Previously, he led the Highways & Utilities Division, managing a team of lawyers, legal assistants, and paralegals on transportation, utility regulation, and public safety matters, and advised the Utah Department of Transportation in eminent domain, real property, and administrative law matters.
Earlier, he served in the State Agency Counsel Division—first as an Assistant Attorney General and later as a Section Chief—supervising the Agency & Public Laws Section and advising a wide range of clients, including the State Records Committee; the Department of Administrative Services (Archives, Finance, Fleet Operations, and Administrative Rules); the Department of Technology Services; the Chief Information Officer’s Office; the State Treasurer (unclaimed property); and the Department of Workforce Services. Before that, he served the Utah Prosecution Council as an Assistant Attorney General, where he wrote, negotiated, and managed a statewide contract to purchase and distribute case management software for prosecutors across Utah and represented the Governor in extradition litigation. He also served as a Judge Pro Tempore in Utah’s Third District Court.
Mark earned both his J.D. and M.P.A. from the University of Utah and a B.A., cum laude with departmental distinction, in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara; he served as a judicial intern to Utah Supreme Court Justice Christine M. Durham and authored “Electronic Home Detention: New Sentencing Alternative Demands Uniform Standards,” 18 J. Contemp. Law 75 (1992). His professional activities include service on the Editorial Board of the Utah Bar Journal, and his work has been recognized with Governor’s Technology Awards (1998, 1999) and the Attorney General’s Office Attorney of the Year (2018).
