Professor Mary D. Fan

Mary D. Fan holds the Jack R. MacDonald Endowed Chair at the University of Washington School of Law.  Professor Fan served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of California.  She also has experience as an Associate Legal Officer at a United Nations criminal tribunal. She is the author of numerous articles and two books: Camera Power: Proof, Policing, Privacy, and Audiovisual Big Data (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Perilous Science: Persistence and Survival in Politically Dangerous Research Domains (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2021).

Professor Fan was elected to the American Law Institute (ALI) in 2012 and is an Advisor to the ALI's Model Penal Code: Sexual Assault and Related Crimes Project.  She was the 2019 Chair of the Law & Anthropology Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS).  She also sits on the Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington.  Trained in epidemiology and anthropology as well as law, Professor Fan collaborates on interdisciplinary violence prevention research as a core faculty member at Harborview Medical Center's Injury Prevention & Research Center. 

The student body has recognized Professor Fan’s teaching with a Philip A. Trautman Professor of the Year Award and she also has been nominated for the university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award.  She is a two-time recipient of the Dean's Medal for excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Mary Fan clerked for the Hon. John T. Noonan, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Judge O-Gon Kwon at the first war crimes tribunal since the World War II era. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. At Yale, she was a Notes Editor for the Yale Law Journal, a Managing Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law, and a Coker Teaching Fellow. She was awarded the Jewell Prize and the Nathan Burkan Prize for her publications.