MORGANTOWN -- Gregory Bowman is proud knowing that his fingerprints and insights are all over a profession that he’s given most of his life to serving.
“It’s wonderfully meaningful to help train the lawyers of tomorrow,” Bowman, sean of the West Virginia William H. Maier, Jr. College of Law, recently told The West Virginia Record. “You’re training your future colleagues.”
Bowman isn’t any run-of-the-mill instructor. He and fellow WVU law school faculty member Patrick McKinley were recently honored as Fellows of the West Virginia Bar Foundation.
Gregory Bowman
“It’s extraordinarily meaningful and very rewarding,” Bowman said of the honor. “It’s an enormous honor to be honored by the bar foundation. This is one of those lifetime achievements that’s very meaningful. It’s recognition of the things I’ve tried to do to serve the legal profession and the state.”
A lifelong West Virginian, Bowman said he is well aware of the rare company receiving the award puts him in.
“There are lots of attorneys to be honored over the years and it’s an honor to be one of them,” he said.
Bowman said he is just as proud of the Bar Foundation and the meaningful work he considers them to be doing.
“The Bar Foundation is a nonprofit that provides scholarships and, most important, it provides support for the college of law,” he said. “They are a very important philanthropic player.”
Although Bowman said no one can be certain of what the future holds, he expressed satisfaction with being at WVU and harbors no plans of being anywhere else anytime soon.
“I love what I am doing,” he said. “I’ve found the best way is to try to focus on what you’re doing right now.”
Bowman joined the WVU faculty in 2009 and is widely renowned as scholar in international trade law and remedies. He is also a former recipient of the WVU Foundation Award for Outstanding Teaching and the College of Law Professor of the Year.
A WVU faculty member since 1975, McGinley is also the Charles H. Haden II professor of law at the school and is nationally recognized as an expert on energy and environmental law. He is also the founder of the Energy and Mineral Law Foundation and a recipient of the international Svitlana Kravchenko Environmental Rights Award.