Mary D. Fan

Mary D. Fan grew up selling grapefruit on the streets of South Phoenix, Arizona. Thanks to the Flinn Foundation, she went on to graduate from the University of Arizona in three years, and save up to earn a JD from Yale Law School. Selected as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, the farm girl got to go abroad and attain her MPhil at the University of Cambridge. The former sunblasted desert urchin now is living in her dream city -- rain-fabulous Seattle. There, Fan is the Henry M. Jackson Endowed Professor at the University of Washington School of Law.

Fan's writing is informed by her experience as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of California. As a federal prosecutor, she worked on hundreds of cases, handling investigations, grand jury and court proceedings, trials, and appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Fan later moved to the Hague, to serve as an Associate Legal Officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Established by the United Nations, the ICTY is the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals after World War II.

Fan was a law clerk to the brilliant jurist and prolific author Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She also was a law clerk to Judge O-Gon Kwon, a distinguished international jurist who presided over historic international criminal cases and is currently President of the Assembly of States Parties to Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.