About

Professor Mary Bowman joined the faculty of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at ASU in 2019. She teaches courses including Legal Method & Writing and Legal Advocacy. Her scholarship focuses on innovations in legal education to help students transfer what they learn into law practice, the role of legal writing in the legal academy, and legal decision-making, particularly in the criminal justice context. She presents on these topics at conferences around the country and incorporates them into her teaching. Prior to joining ASU, Professor Bowman taught legal writing at Seattle University School of Law, where she served as Director of the Legal Writing Program. She played a key role in integrating professional development concepts and lawyering skills into the required legal writing curriculum and partnered with the school’s clinical program on the “Real Client in the First Year Project,” which brought live issues from the clinic or external nonprofits into the 1L legal writing course. She also taught pretrial and appellate oral advocacy and writing. Professor Bowman graduated Order of the Coif from Stanford Law School and Summa Cum Laude from Seattle University. She served as a law clerk for The Honorable Thomas Zilly at the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington and practiced environmental and employment law at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP in Seattle.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Criminology
• Law
• Law and economics
• Gender studies
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Seeking Justice: Prosecution Strategies for Avoiding Racially Biased Convictions

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology
  PublisherDOI

• Confronting Racist Prosecutorial Rhetoric at Trial

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Confronting Racist Prosecutorial Rhetoric at Trial

  Case Western Reserve law review · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Racist prosecutorial rhetoric is an oft-overlooked component of structural racism within the criminal justice system. Social psychology and neuroscience research explain how racist rhetoric affects decision-making, as well as how to avoid biased decision-making. But current law tolerates and even encourages prosecutors to use racist rhetoric to ensure convictions. This article educates judges, prosecutors, and other scholars about how to recognize racist prosecutorial rhetoric, how to prevent it in most cases, and how to effectively deal with it when it occurs. Specifically, it focuses on trial courts for solutions, providing them with a checklist of how to draw lines between proper and improper argument. It recommends prohibiting many common rhetorical choices prosecutors use, such as animal imagery and us/them arguments. It also recommends requiring prosecutors to file a motion in limine to justify proposed references to race in individual cases; courts should only allow these references when their probative value significantly outweighs the potential prejudicial effect. The article also contains strategies for effectively preventing biased decision-making when prosecutors use racist rhetoric and a method for tracking repeat violators for more systemic solutions. These solutions would help ensure fair trials and contribute to the racial reckoning in the criminal justice system.

  Publisher

• Legal Writing as Office Housework?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Legal Writing as Office Housework

  Journal of legal education · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay examines persistent status issues that legal writing faculty face through the lens of Joan Williams’s “office housework” paradigm. Office housework includes tasks that are not valuable for career advancement, even when they are necessary for an organization’s success. Williams’s research shows significant gender and racial disparities across industries in who carries disproportionate burdens of office housework. These disparities mirror the disparities seen when comparing the composition of legal writing faculties to the composition of law school faculties generally, as well as the salary and security of position disparities between the two groups. Applying this paradigm, the essay argues that legal writing faculty disproportionately bear the burden of three types of office housework: (1) important but undervalued assignments (e.g. providing detailed formative assessment); (2) emotional labor (e.g. dealing with student upset by providing grades before our colleagues do); and (3) work that sounds impressive but is undervalued for salary or promotion purposes (e.g. service obligations and directing legal writing programs). The essay then offers preliminary thoughts on strategic solutions that law schools could use to rectify persistent status disparities faced by legal writing faculty.

  Publisher

• Making and Breaking Connections: Valuable Perspectives on Persuasion, Review of Legal Persuasion: A Rhetorical Approach to the Science Linda L. Berger & Kathryn M. Stanchi

  2018-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Cracking Student Silos: Linking Legal Writing and Clinical Learning Through Transference

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• (Busting) Out of Our Silos: Lessons Learned from a Clinician Taking 1L Legal Writing

  2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  How can we build an integrated legal skills curriculum that helps our students transfer the beginning skills they learn in their 1L year to advanced capacity in their clinics and externships to practice ready at graduation? For the last several years, legal writing and clinical faculty at Seattle U have collaborated and approached this exciting question in a number of ways, including holding yearly retreats on improving our students’ transference abilities, building a shared vocabulary, and collaborating on assignments so that our 1Ls provide research and writing support to our clinical students on a live issue from a real clinic case (our Real Clients in the First Year Project). These projects have all been great in improving student learning and in creating a supportive community of skills faculty at Seattle U. This year, though, we took our collaboration and teaching for transfer concepts to a new level - our Clinic Director, Lisa Brodoff, sat in on Legal Writing Program Director Mary Bowman’s first-year legal writing course all year. In this presentation, Lisa and Mary will share some of the many the insights that they learned from this process, focusing on ideas that may be helpful for people from other schools who want to get out of their silos and teach for transfer of skills across the curriculum.

  Publisher

• Mitigating Foul Blows

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2014-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  For nearly eighty years, courts have offered stirring rhetoric about how prosecutors must not strike foul blows in pursuit of convictions. Yet while appellate courts are often quick to condemn prosecutorial trial misconduct, they rarely provide any meaningful remedy. Instead, courts routinely affirm convictions, relying on defense counsel's failure to object or concluding that the misconduct was merely harmless error. Jerome Frank summed up the consequences of this dichotomy best when he noted that the courts' attitude of helpless piety in prosecutorial misconduct cases breeds a deplorably cynical attitude toward the judiciary. Cognitive bias research illuminates the reasons for, and solutions to, the gap between rhetoric and reality in prosecutorial misconduct cases. This article is the first to explore theories of cognition that help explain the frequency of prosecutorial misconduct and the ways that it likely affects jurors and reviewing judges more than they realize. As a result, the article advocates for sweeping changes to the doctrine of harmless error and modest changes to the doctrine of plain error as applied in prosecutorial misconduct cases. These solutions will help courts abandon their attitude of helpless piety, clarify the currently ambiguous law on what behavior constitutes prosecutorial misconduct, encourage defense counsel to raise timely objections to misconduct, and reverse convictions when misconduct may well have affected the outcome of the case but affirm when the misconduct was trivial.

  Publisher

• Engaging First-Year Law Students Through Pro Bono Collaborations in Legal Writing

  Journal of legal education · 2013-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  So much in our legal education tell[s] us that we need to distance ourselves and detach, which I find hard to do. We begin to talk about human conflict as a math problem that has a calculated rational answer. Also, when we talk about made-up and absurd hypos, it is hard to get invested in the people involved. The reality of these [collaborative] assignments helped me reengage in the material and in the work on a level that I haven’t been able to in my other courses. 1

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Brodoff

  Seattle University

  4 shared

• Sara Rankin

  2 shared

• Ada Shen-Jaffe

  1 shared

• Erin B. Corcoran

  University of Florida

  1 shared

• Robert Hornstein

  1 shared

• Davida Finger

  1 shared

• Bill Quigley

  1 shared

• Florence Wagman Roisman

  1 shared