News

Incoming 1L Noah Miller ’26 is from Pine City, Minnesota. He is a graduate of Bethel University in St. Paul. Prior to coming to law school, he held positions in court administration and at the Minnesota Appellate Defender’s Office.

Welcome to Minnesota Law! Can you tell us why you chose the University of Minnesota Law School? 

After years of work, the Binger Center for New Americans has achieved key objectives to protect the rights of noncitizens subject to immigration custody. The Binger Center’s work—spearheaded by the Federal Immigration Litigation Clinic (FILC), the Detainee Rights Clinic (DRC), and some of the Center’s nonprofit and law firm partners—has focused on noncitizens with criminal histories who are spending years in mandatory civil immigration detention in Minnesota with little opportunity to meaningfully challenge their custody.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has named Minnesota Law alum Lee Sheehy '77 to replace outgoing Community Safety Commissioner Cedric Alexander on an interim basis.

"Lee has a long history of navigating complex challenges," Frey said in an interview Friday.

Sheehy will take helm of the office that oversees police and four other city departments on Sept. 1, when Alexander will leave after serving a just over a year as the city's inaugural commissioner.

Students in the Detainee Rights Clinic (DRC) recently scored a major victory for a client formerly from El Salvador who has been seeking asylum for nearly a decade.

The clinic began representing the person in 2014, one of its first clients. Clinic leaders secured the person’s release from detention to stay deportation. Over the next few years, students worked with faculty to win an appeal at the Board of Immigration that opened a pathway for asylum.

Professor Kristin Hickman was appointed as a Senior Fellow by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), to serve a two-year term. The Administrative Conference of the United States is an independent, non-partisan federal agency within the executive branch dedicated to improving administrative law and federal regulatory processes. It conducts applied research, and provides expert recommendations and other advice, to improve federal agency procedures. Its membership is composed of senior federal officials, academics, and other experts from the private sector.

On June 9, the Minnesota's Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) held a judicial investiture ceremony to formally swear in the 11 newest judges who have joined OAH since 2019. Four of those judges are University of Minnesota Law School alumni. Around 400 guests attended the ceremony, which was open to the public. Minnesota Law alumni sworn in, include: Chief Judge Jenny Starr '03; Workers' Compensation Judge David M.

In her role as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the protection of rights while countering terrorism, Prof. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin held a press conference on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland, to report on her end-of-mandate visit to Syria where she called attention to the lingering “mass arbitrary detention” in Syria's infamous al-Hol camp and others like it that she saw during her trip to the region last week—a visit that was billed as the first visit of its kind by an independent human rights expert.

Ronald M. Mankoff ‘54, passed away on June 27, 2023. Born on the Cheyenne River Reservation near Gettysburg, South Dakota on October 13, 1931, Ron, his parents Sarah Frank Mankoff and Harry Mankoff, along with his sister Marilyn, resettled in Minneapolis during the Great Depression.