Professor Mary Beck is the principal of LMB and has been practicing adoption law for over 30 years. Mary is also a family nurse practitioner, an emerita professor of law at the University of Missouri Law School, and a fellow in the Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproductive Technology Attorneys.

Mary directed the Family Violence Clinic at MU Law for 27 years where she supervised law students representing abused women and children seeking orders of protection throughout Missouri, completed adoptions for abused/orphaned children, and obtained guardianships for the children of dying custodial parents and for disabled adults. She and her students also represented disabled adoptees in the Missouri Appellate Court, filed successful clemency/pardon petitions for abused women with Missouri’s Governors, and litigated extraordinary writs for clemency issues for abused women in Missouri’s Appellate and Supreme Courts.

Mary published an article urging the enactment of a national putative father registry in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy in 2002. Since then, Mary has drafted putative father registry bills in multiple states and for Congress. Her work on putative father registry law has led to an appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper, an interview on National Public Radio, and mention in the New York Times. In 2017, Mary published an article in the Michigan Journal of Gender and the Law describing prenatal abandonment theory in adoption following the United States Supreme Court 2013 decision in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl.

Mary’s service includes running a free clinic; drafting legislation on birth parents’ rights, adoption of children, stand by guardianship, and domestic violence; helping with the Covid vaccination effort. She has also written Amicus Curiae briefs on behalf of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys to state courts and to the United States Supreme Court including in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl and in Brackeen v. Haaland.

Mary enjoys time spent with her husband of 52 years, their 4 children and 9 grandchildren, and their English Setters as well as biking and traveling.