Marie Wako is a JSD candidate at Stanford Law School whose research examines how race and gender shape legal institutions in the United States and Japan. Her work combines empirical legal studies, computational text analysis, criminal law, and comparative law to understand how racial and gender inequality emerges through everyday legal processes.
Her dissertation project, Racialized Language in Criminal Courtrooms, analyzes how language used by courtroom actors in U.S. criminal trials could invoke and reinforce racial bias. Drawing on a novel dataset of approximately 400 trial transcripts, her research examines how racialization can operate through subtle linguistic choices in a procedurally constrained legal setting. In particular, she studies how courtroom actors describe defendants, frame narratives, and emphasize key details. The project aims to contribute evidence and methods that can inform more equitable courtroom practices and support claims under the newly enacted California Racial Justice Act.
Her broader research also includes a comparative study of gender and judging in Japan. Her study quantitatively examines whether the presence of a female judge influences sentencing outcomes in sexual offenses, as well as conducts NLP analysis to examine how descriptions of victim harm in sexual offenses differ between opinions written by all-male benches and benches with a female judge.
She holds an LL.M. from Stanford Law School and a J.D. and LL.B. from the University of Tokyo. She is a licensed attorney in Japan and New York.