News

Governor-Elect Tim Walz appointed Nancy Leppink ’85 as commissioner of the Department of Labor and Industry.

Leppink is currently chief of labour administration with the Labour Inspection and Occupational Safety and Health Branch of the International Labour Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

Leppink has more than 25 years’ experience as a strategist and leader in employment and labor policy, law, administration, enforcement and compliance. Her experience includes work at the international, national, and state levels working with public, private and non-profit sectors

Minnesota Gov.-elect Tim Walz has appointed Rebecca Lucero ’07 as commissioner of the state’s Department of Human Rights. 

Lucero currently serves as the public policy director at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.

Professor Allan Erbsen was recently elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. The group drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles of Law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.

Erbsen joins about 20 fellow faculty members currently teaching at Minnesota Law who have been elected to ALI membership.

When Troy Bader ’88 launched his legal career 30 years ago, his long-term interest was in a transactional practice. His immediate impulse, though, was to get into the courtroom and try cases.

David S. Weissbrodt has collected documents that fill 100 file cabinets. He has shepherded more than 500 interns into his chosen field. He has founded a Human Rights Center at Minnesota Law that turns 30 this year. But for this internationally renowned human rights lawyer, author, scholar, teacher, and advocate, who officially retired Sept. 1, the work is never done.

The Law School’s magazine, known for the last 13 years as Perspectives, has undergone a name change. Starting with the current issue (Fall 2018), the magazine’s new name is Minnesota Law.

“We renamed the magazine Minnesota Law to more closely align it to the Law School’s branding and better connect it to the Law School community,” said Dean Garry W. Jenkins in a letter to readers in the inaugural edition of Minnesota Law.

Welcome to a new version of your alumni magazine! As you may recall, our award-winning alumni magazine was formerly called Perspectives, a name it has borne since fall 2005. Prior to that, the magazine’s title was Law Alumni News. Today we rename the magazine Minnesota Law, to more closely align it with the Law School’s branding and better connect to our Law School community. After 13 years in the same format, the time also seemed right to freshen and modernize the look and feel of the magazine. We hope you like it, and, as always, we welcome your feedback.

At all levels of education, meaningful teacher feedback is crucial to a student’s growth. But until recently, law schools seldom gave students more than a cold letter grade on exams weeks, if not months, after the completion of their first-semester core classes.

Cheryl Dalby ’95 has accepted the position of chief executive officer of the Minnesota State Bar Association, Hennepin County Bar Association, and Ramsey County Bar Associations.

The combined CEO position was created after the boards of directors of the three associations decided in June 2018 to adopt a shared staff model to better coordinate efforts, increase efficiencies, and improve member value. Dalby, who has served as executive director of the Ramsey County Bar Association for the last 18 years, was selected after a nationwide search.

The Law School’s National Moot Court Competition teams continued the program’s success in achieving outstanding results at the Region 14 tournament, with one team making it to the semi-finals and the other emerging as regional champions.

The Region 14 competition was hosted by the University of South Dakota Law School in Sioux Falls on Nov. 16-17. The Respondent team (3Ls Allison Chadwick, Kelly Nizzari, and Brendan Johnson) completed a clean sweep of the awards: Region 14 champions; best Respondent brief; best overall brief; and best oral advocate in the finals (Nizzari).