Steve Simon (’96) was elected Minnesota Secretary of State earlier this month, winning a close race by a margin of 22,000 out of 1.9 million votes cast. He will take office in January.

On Nov. 20, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child celebrated its 25th anniversary. In honor of this milestone, Kristi Rudelius-Palmer, co-director of the Human Rights Center, and the Law School's Fulbright Humphrey Fellow Vered Windman, participated in a mock U.S. Senate hearing on children's rights legislation at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Boston, which will officially open in March. The institute has a replica of the U.S.

Student attorneys in the University of Minnesota Law School's Detainee Rights Clinic have secured a remand from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) for a client who had been detained in the state of Nevada.

Tim Looby (’82) has been appointed by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton to serve as a judge in the state's First Judicial District. He replaces Judge Thomas McCarthy, who retired. The First Judicial District, with 36 judges, more than 250 staff employees, and an annual caseload topping 150,000, encompasses a seven-county area just south of the Twin Cities. Looby's investiture ceremony was held Oct. 24.

The Minnesota Justice Foundation (MJF) has announced that among the recipients of its Outstanding Service Awards this year will be Law School alumna Sara Sommarstrom (’05) and third-year law student George Byron "Geordie" Griffiths. The awards will be presented at the MJF Annual Awards Celebration on November 19.

In 1914, three students from China—Pan Wen Huen, Pan Wen Ping, and Kwong Yi Kum—enrolled at the University of Minnesota. Today, the University hosts more than 2,200 students and scholars from China each year. China 100 is the University's yearlong celebration honoring those first Chinese students and the wealth of connections that have come in the century since.

A new study by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO) at the University of Minnesota Law School showed that charter schools in Chicago underperform comparable traditional public schools and are more highly segregated by race. The analysis used comprehensive data for Chicago schools in 2012-13 and controlled for the mix of students and other challenges faced by individual schools.

David Weissbrodt, founder and co-director of the Human Rights Center, a member of the Law School faculty since 1975 and a local, national, and global leader in human rights advocacy, has been named a 2014 recipient of the Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award. The honor recognizes educators who have inspired their former students to "create an organization which has demonstrably conferred a benefit on the community at large."

Professor Heidi Kitrosser's forthcoming book, Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, has been named the recipient of the 2014 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. The book will be published in January by the University of Chicago Press.

If you want to make Ruth Bader Ginsburg smile, wear clothing based on her social media meme. The U.S. Supreme Court justice has inspired "Notorious R.B.G.," a Tumblr dedicated to all things Ginsburg. In one image on the site, she is pictured wearing a rakish crown in the style of the rapper Notorious B.I.G.

"Oh, I like your T-shirt," Ginsburg told an admirer wearing Notorious R.B.G. apparel at Tuesday's Law School-sponsored question-and-answer session.