John Cook

Assistant Professor of Law

(501) 916-5427
Email: [email protected]

Curriculum Vitae

John Cook teaches Research, Writing & Analysis I and II. He is also the Director of the Rural Practice Incubator Project and an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Criminal Justice and Racial Justice Reform. In 2025, he received both the law school and the university’s Faculty Excellence Awards for Rising Faculty.

Professor Cook received his B.A. from Yale University, his M.Sc. from Oxford University, and his J.D. from Duke University School of Law. He is a member of the bars of New York, Connecticut, the Northern Mariana Islands, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and the United States Supreme Court. He is also a member of Phi Delta Phi and a Life Fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Professor Cook served as a law clerk in the Rhode Island Trial Court Law Clerk Department, and as a law clerk for Associate Justice Alexandro Castro of the Supreme Court of the Northern Mariana Islands, Judge Frank Whitney of the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, Judge Landya McCafferty of the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire, and Judge Ralph Erickson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. He has also worked as an Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the Office of the Attorney General of the Northern Mariana Islands and twice served as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Archivist at Northern Marianas College.

Before joining the Bowen faculty, Professor Cook taught for two years as a Legal Method and Communication Fellow at Elon University School of Law and for two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of North Dakota School of Law. He also taught in an adjunct capacity at both Charlotte School of Law and Northern Marianas College. He serves as a member of the editorial board of Legal Writing: The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute and was a participant in the 2023 Association of Legal Writing Directors Leadership Academy.

Professor Cook’s scholarship includes the article Is Esquire a Higher Clearance Than Top Secret?: A Comparison of the Bar Admission and National Security Clearance Processes, which was published in the Harvard National Security Journal in 2022. He was also a co-editor of the legal writing textbook Legal Argumentation: Reasoning & Writing about the Law, which was published by CALI eLangdell Press in 2025.