Legal Writing Specialist
Emerita Professor of Law
Education
A.B., Bryn Mawr College, summa cum laude
J.D., Yale Law School
Areas of expertise: Legal Research & Writing; Legal Editing and Citation
Courses taught: Legal Research and Writing I; Legal Research and Writing II; Writing to Persuade (offered through the Dispute Resolution Institute); Lawyering: Advice and Persuasion; Legal Reasoning Workshop I; LLM Legal Research and Writing; Legal Reasoning and Writing (offered through the Summer CLEO program); Legal Writing (offered through the Summer CAP program).
Mary B. Trevor is an Emerita Professor of Law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. She also has served there as an academic excellence tutor and legal writing specialist in the Office of Academic Excellence, where she specialized in tutoring for writing assignments for the lawyering and advocacy courses and in working with students preparing for the bar. In addition, she has periodically taught writing and skills classes for incoming, first-year, and LL.M. students, and she has served as a consultant for the first-year legal writing program.
Professor Trevor started her legal career as a business litigator at Leonard, Street and Deinard (now Stinson Leonard Street) in Minneapolis. After leaving practice, she worked part time teaching Legal Research and Writing (LRW) and tutoring students at various local law schools while raising her family. She returned to work full time to teach at Hamline Law, where she first taught LRW and, periodically, a persuasive writing course for the Dispute Resolution Institute. She then directed the Hamline LRW department until the merger of William Mitchell and Hamline Law.
While at Hamline, Professor Trevor pursued her interest in Alternative Dispute Resolution by serving as the associate editor for the Journal of Alternative Dispute Resolution in Employment, co-authoring an article about incorporating a mediation simulation into the LRW curriculum, and acting as a frequent co-editor with Professor Giuseppe De Palo, now senior fellow at the Mitchell Hamline Dispute Resolution Institute, of books and articles about the use of ADR in international business transactions.
Professor Trevor has also authored an article about the use of humor in judicial opinions, as well as an article providing suggestions for practicing attorneys who supervise the writing of novice attorneys. She has worked as a writing coach for summer associates and novice attorneys at the Dorsey & Whitney and Stinson Leonard Street law firms in Minneapolis.
Professor Trevor now divides her time between occasional classroom teaching and tutoring at Mitchell Hamline, freelance editing of legal articles and books, designing online grammar and citation exercises for West Academic, spending as much time as possible with her granddaughter, and trying to rein in two rambunctious labradoodles.
Two truths and a lie: Professor Trevor once apologized to a classroom podium she bumped into while teaching. Professor Trevor once played Mabel in a production of The Pirates of Penzance. Professor Trevor once was the soloist for the National Anthem at a William Mitchell vs. Hamline ice hockey game
