News

The Law School welcomed graduates and their families for the 2019 Student Awards and Recognition Ceremony, held at 2 p.m. on May 17 iat the Law School. The event acknowledged outstanding student achievement among those in the Class of 2019, prior to the May 18 commencement.

The Board of Regents has approved the promotion of Prentiss Cox ’90 to professor of law, effective with the start of the 2019-20 academic year.

Cox ’90 writes and teaches in the area of consumer protection law, public civil law enforcement, civil procedure and legal practice skills. He is co-founder of Law in Practice, which is a required 1L course teaching integrated doctrinal and professional skills learning.

3L Paul Dimick and Mary Georgevich ’18 have been awarded prestigious Equal Justice Works Fellowships to provide advocacy and education assistance to immigrants.

Dimick will work with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, where he will represent low-income immigrants in detention. He also plans to develop a Federal Habeas Corpus Manual for other attorneys representing detained non-citizens.

In a highly publicized ruling last month, a panel of three U.S. District Court judges found that 34 congressional and state legislative districts in Michigan were unconstitutional because they were the products of partisan gerrymandering.

Jeff Justman ’09, a partner at Faegre Baker Daniels, was one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiffs, the League of Women Voters of Michigan and 11 individual Michigan voters. (The representation was pro bono.)

Professor Herbert Kritzer has been named one of this year’s recipients of the Law and Society Association’s Legacy Award.

This lifetime achievement award honors people whose contributions significantly helped to develop the association through sustained commitment to its mission and legacy.

Data privacy has become an issue of pressing concern to virtually every technology user. Minnesota Law Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs William McGeveran, who was in the vanguard of legal experts entering the field, is working both inside and outside of academia to shed light on the challenges of data privacy in the digital age.

The Law School congratulates Kelly Mitchell, executive director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, on being appointed chair of the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission. Ms. Mitchell was appointed by Governor Tim Walz and began her appointment in April. She replaces the Hon. Christopher Dietzen as Commission Chair.

In January, when the Minnesota House of Representatives convened for the first session of the new biennium, the spectacle at the front of the chamber looked a bit like a Law School reunion.

Laura Coates ’05 always knew she was a storyteller at heart. A St. Paul native, Coates always loved performing on stage with school and community theater groups and was drawn to the law because it offered a different kind of stage—the courtroom.

Were there any formative experiences at Minnesota Law that helped send you on your path (a class, a clinic, a professor, etc.)?

Yes, many, but I’ll pick two. First, Professor Kristin Hickman’s administrative law class opened my eyes to the power of the administrative state and its pervasive role in our daily lives. Second, serving on the Minnesota Law Review introduced me to legal scholarship on dozens of different topics and made me a better writer and clearer thinker.