Professor Mary D. Fan's expertise includes criminal law and procedure, evidence, information privacy, and crimmigration. She is the author of numerous articles in leading law reviews and a recent book Camera Power: Proof, Policing, Privacy, and Audiovisual Big Data, published by Cambridge University Press. Her research and teaching are informed by her experiences as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of California and as an associate legal officer at a United Nations criminal tribunal. Her scholarship has been cited by judges, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and in major media venues.
Among Professor Fan’s most cherished honors is that the student body has three times voted to award her Professor of the Year. She also has been nominated for the university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. She also received the Dean's Medal for excellence in teaching, scholarship and service twice and also received the Washington Law Review’s Richard O. Kummert Outstanding Contribution Award.
Professor Fan was the Herman Phleger Visiting Professor at Stanford Law School in winter 2022, where she taught first-year criminal law. She was a Visiting Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2017-18. Professor Fan is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and an elected Life Fellow of the American Bar Association (ABA). She also serves on the Board of Directors for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)-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. She also is an affiliate faculty member at the Center for an Informed Public, an interdisciplinary collaboration on the integrity of information at the University of Washington.
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.
