The Federal Immigration Litigation Clinic, led by Nadia Anguiano ’17, associate clinical professor of law, received an honorable mention for the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Award for Excellence in a Public Interest Case or Project at the Association of American Law Schools 2024 Conference on Clinical Legal Education. The clinic, in collaboration with the University of Miami Law School’s Immigration Clinic and a coalition of advocates, represented 92 people from Somalia who were shackled and abused for two days on a failed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight in 2017.
James Coleman, professor of law, has been selected as a 2024 IonE Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. IonE Fellows are established scholars who have demonstrated excellence in one or more disciplines related to environment, climate, or sustainability. Coleman is a scholar of energy law and specializes in North American energy infrastructure, transport, and trade. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focused on energy policy.
Charlotte Garden has been appointed the Gray, Plant, Mooty, Mooty & Bennett Professor of Law. She has also been elected a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Garden specializes in labor law, employment law, and constitutional law. Her interests include the intersection of workers’ rights and the Constitution, and how law supports or undermines workers’ voice and power. Her scholarship has appeared in several leading law reviews, including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Boston University Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and the William & Mary Law Review.
Kristin Hickman, McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, and Harlan Albert Rogers Professor of Law, was appointed Minnesota Law's associate dean for faculty and intellectual life in July. Hickman is a leading authority in the fields of tax administration, administrative law, and statutory interpretation. This past summer, her administrative law treatise was cited in a footnote by the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision of Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
William McGeveran was appointed the 12th dean of the University of Minnesota Law School and William S. Pattee Professor of Law earlier this year. He joined the faculty in 2006. Before he was appointed dean, he served as interim dean and associate dean for academic affairs. His scholarship focuses on information law, especially data privacy, intellectual property, communications and technology, and free speech. He is a highly cited scholar, particularly for his work on commercial privacy regulation and the intersection of trademark law and free expression.
Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law, was appointed Lawfare’s research director for a new research initiative that formalizes Lawfare’s long-form research across law, national security, foreign policy, and technology. This expansion has been made possible through the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and will focus on technology policy, as well as international law, foreign policy, and democracy protection. He also serves as a Lawfare senior editor. Additionally, Rozenshtein was recently named a nonresident senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that seeks to improve governance at local, national, and global levels.
Francis Shen, Solly Robins Distinguished Research Scholar, is part of the interdisciplinary and multi-institutional team leading the Neurotech Justice Accelerator at Mass General Brigham (NJAM), launched by the Dana Foundation. The five-year, $8.6 million initiative aims to improve equitable access to beneficial neurotechnologies and to mitigate the associated risks in medical and legal settings. The team comprises practitioners and scholars in neurosurgery, neuroethics, and neurolaw from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Minnesota. NJAM integrates training in clinical practice, law, ethics, and neuroscience — disciplines that typically operate independently.
Jack Whiteley, associate professor of law, was selected to become a 2024 IonE Associate at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment this fall. IonE Associates are early-career scholars motivated to develop community-engaged, interdisciplinary, impact-oriented careers in environmental scholarship. Whiteley writes about environmental law, property, and evidence. He is interested in the conceptual and historical foundations of these fields and the connections between judge-made law and public law.
Susan Wolf, Regents Professor, McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine & Public Policy, Faegre Drinker Professor of Law, and Professor of Medicine, and researchers at the University of Minnesota are partnering with scientists at the Smithsonian Institute and other institutions across the country to propose a plan that could safeguard Earth’s endangered biodiversity through storage on the moon at extremely low temperatures. The study published in BioScience outlines a roadmap for creating a lunar biorepository. The paper proposes an approach for governance, the types of biological material to be stored, and a plan for experiments to address challenges such as radiation and microgravity.
Ilan Wurman, who joined the Law School this fall as an associate professor of law, has been named the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law. Prior to joining Minnesota Law, he was an associate professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. He writes primarily on the Fourteenth Amendment, administrative law, separation of powers, presidential power, and constitutionalism.
Minnesota Law Welcomes Three New Faculty in 2025
Amna A. Akbar will join Minnesota Law as the Benjamin N. Berger Professor of Criminal Law in fall 2025. She is currently the Charles W. Ebersold & Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Samuel J. Merchant will join Minnesota Law as associate professor of law in fall 2025. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of law at Oklahoma University College of Law.
Vinita R. Singh will join Minnesota Law as an associate professor of law in fall 2025. She is currently a visiting assistant professor and faculty fellow at the University of Iowa College of Law.