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After graduating from Northern Arizona University in 2014, 2022 JD graduate Daniel Bowman took a few years to think about what he wanted to do next. He waited tables for a few months before getting a job as a 911 dispatcher for the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
“It was a good way to serve people, which is what I wanted to do with my criminal justice degree, try to help people when they needed it,” says Daniel of his time as a dispatcher. “I liked it, but I also felt like I could do a little more, so that led me to law school.”
He began to dive into different areas of interest but quickly decided he wanted to work with and help undocumented populations.
“I grew up in trailer parks, worked minimum wage jobs since I was thirteen, and always had a lot of co-workers who did not have [legal] status,” says Daniel. “The Trump administration’s policies, specifically, made me feel concerned with how we talked about and treated immigrants in this country. So, I started looking for ways to get involved and help.”
During law school, Daniel, who has been selected by his peers as a student speaker at this year’s convocation, volunteered with Keep Tucson Together (KTT), a grassroots, pro-bono legal group working with volunteer attorneys to stop deportations and the separation of families in Southern Arizona. As a volunteer, he provided appellate writing for pro se individuals who were appealing their removal orders to the Ninth Circuit, which he says were some of his proudest moments as a student.
Daniel says his time volunteering outside of school and writing for KTT helped him become a better writer, a skill he advises future JD students to invest the time in.
“Learn how to write clearly. That is going to help both in law school and in practice. Judges do not want to read things that are convoluted any more than law professors do,” says Daniel. “It is a real-world useful skill. Nobody is going to become an IP expert in law school, but you can become a good writer.”
In addition to writing for KTT, Daniel also co-authored an article with Associate Dean, Legal Information Innovation and Director, Law Library & Professor of Law Teresa Miguel-Stearns that will appear as a series in the fall of 2022 in the Arizona Attorney, the official publication of the State Bar of Arizona. The article explores the history of bar admission without exam in the 1920s in Arizona, the role the University of Arizona College of Law played in that history, and implications for the future of legal education in the U.S.
After graduation, Daniel will be spending time clerking, first for Chief Justice Robert M. Brutinel (’82) in the Arizona Supreme Court and then for U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso, Texas, where he hopes to get involved with immigration law during his free time.
To learn more about Daniel’s advocacy work so far, memories of law school, and plans for the future, see here.
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