Sukanya Momsen (’16) Wins ABA and MSBA Awards

Sukanya Momsen (’16) has been awarded second place in the American Bar Association Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section's 2014-15 law student writing competition. Her article, "Discharging the Duty to Warn with Multilingual Warning Labels," will appear on the Section's Web site within the next few weeks and will be publicized in its magazine, The Brief. Momsen was also recently named the winner of the Minnesota State Bar Association's 2015 Law Student Award for Excellence in Employment Law.

Momsen earned her B.A. at the University of Minnesota in 2013, graduating summa cum laude—having completed all her coursework in two years—with a major in English and a minor in Asian languages and literature. At the Law School, she has served on the staff of the Minnesota Journal of International Law and as president of the South Asian Law Student Association, among many other roles. She is currently working as a summer associate at Nilan Johnson Lewis in Minneapolis; she has previously been a legal intern at the Minneapolis office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a judicial extern for U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson, a summer associate at Briggs and Morgan, and a legal counseling advocate at the nonprofit organization Tubman.

In her ABA award-winning paper, which she originally wrote for a product liability course with adjunct professor Kenneth Ross, Momsen discusses issues arising from multilingual warning labels in the United States and abroad, and offers possible solutions to these problems. She analyzes relevant U.S. case law, looks at labeling rules in other countries, and advocates for a new approach to reducing injuries that can stem from the increasing presence of non-English speakers in American workplaces.