Consistent with the present disclosure, a method and system for detecting a clock phase of an optical signal in a coherent receiver is provided that is insensitive to polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and other polarization effects in the optical communication system. The clock phase of the received signal is estimated by first calculating a phase shift between a pair of related frequency domain data outputs of a Fourier transform circuit. The calculated phase shift includes a phase component and a data spectrum component. The calculated phase shift is then averaged over a number of clock cycles to remove the data spectrum components thus enabling extraction of the phase component. A determinant function on the time averaged result is used to normalize any effects of PMD from the received signal and isolate the phase component. In this manner, the phase component is not dependent on the PMD effects in the optical communication system. The imaginary part of the phase component is then calculated to estimate the clock phase error which is used to tune an oscillator in the receiver to synchronize a sampling phase in the receiver with the received signal. An estimated value for the chromatic dispersion is determined from a resultant value of the determinant function and used to compensate for the effects of chromatic dispersion from the clock phase error estimate.