Biography

Mark Painter served for exactly 30 years as a judge (Ides March 1982–Ides March 2012). He was elected to the Ohio Court of Appeals in 1994 and re-elected without opposition in 2000 and 2006. Previously, he served on the Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Municipal Court for 13 years.

In 2009 he was elected by the General Assembly of the United Nations to the United Nations Appeals Tribunal. He was the only American on the seven-member court. He left the UN court in 2012 and is now Of Counsel with the Cincinnati firm Helmer Martins.

A Cincinnati native, Painter attended the University of Cincinnati, where he was elected Student Body President in 1969. He earned a BA in 1970 and a JD in 1973. He practiced law for nine years before becoming a judge. 

As a judge, Painter was recognized as an outstanding legal scholar. More than 400 of Judge Painter’s decisions were published nationally, making him one of the most-published judges ever. His opinions have been cited as precedent more than 3,500 times in legal encyclopedias, treatises, law reviews, and other cases. One of his opinions was named one of the six best in the nation for 2005.

For 20 years (18 editions), Painter was the author of Ohio Driving Under the Influence Law, the only textbook on DUI in Ohio. He is coauthor of another legal treatise, Ohio Appellate Practice. He has written four law review articles, 160 articles for other journals, Internet biographies of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William Howard Taft, and Warren Harding, and a biography, William Howard Taft: President and Chief Justice. Write Well: 25 Rules to Improve Your Business and Professional Writing was published in 2007.

His book on plain writing, The Legal Writer: 30 Rules for the Art of Legal Writing, was published in 2002, and sold out within a year. The Legal Writer: 40 Rules for the Art of Legal Writing came out in 2003, and is now in its fifth edition (2108).

As an Adjunct Professor of Law at the U.C. College of Law for 20 years, Painter taught agency and partnership for 13 years and advanced legal writing for 7 years. He was named Distinguished Visiting Professor at UC for 2008. He has lectured at more than 260 seminars for the Ohio Judicial College, the Ohio State Bar Association, Professional Education Systems Institute, the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, and countless firms and bar associations nationwide. In 2008, he traveled to Malaysia as one of four international experts on plain-language legal writing. In 2010, he spoke at the Fifth International Conference on Administrative Justice in Montreal.

Painter has served as a Trustee of the Cincinnati Freestore/Foodbank, the Ohio Justice & Policy Institute, the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, the American Society of Legal Writers (Scribes), the Mary Jo Brueggeman Scholarship Fund, the Friends of the William Howard Taft Birthplace, and the Citizens School Committee. He is a member of the American and Ohio State Bar Associations, the Plain Language International Network (Plain), Clarity, the National Space Society, the Ohio Historical Society, and the World Future Society; and a life member of Scribes and the Friends of the William Howard Taft Birthplace.

Painter lived in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Clifton Heights–Fairview for 46 years. He and his wife, Sue Ann Painter, married in 1986. They moved to Downtown Cincinnati in 2011