Both the practice of law and higher education are undergoing significant upheaval during this norm-breaking era in American history. At the same time, interest in law school is surging — Minnesota Law saw a 40% increase in applications this year. Clearly, students are eager to gain skills and knowledge to do their part in responding to the legal uncertainty and turbulence they see today. Through skillful teaching, responsive scholarship, and practical training woven into the curriculum, Minnesota Law faculty are preparing students to rise to the challenge.
It isn’t always easy. How do you teach and write about the law while it is changing so rapidly, and when public distrust and attacks upon institutions and norms we have long taken for granted reach unprecedented levels?
How are Minnesota Law faculty teaching and writing about the law while it is changing so rapidly? We asked Professors Alan Rozenshtein, Nicholas Bednar ’16, Jill Hasday, Nadia Anguiano ’17, Richard Painter, and Kristin Hickman to share their approaches.
Building the Legal Toolkit
Associate Professor of Law Nicholas Bednar ’16 regularly confronts this question when teaching legislation and regulation, a course required for graduation. When he first taught that class in 2023, he told students that there might be one or two breaking news stories or court decisions that connected to the course material. By spring of 2025, Bednar said, students asked questions about current events every day.
“Students are trying to grapple with how they connect what they are seeing in the real world with the legal principles they are learning in the classroom,” says Bednar, who also sees the trend when he teaches an advanced elective on policymaking and public administration. “There has been a disconnect for students who are learning essential laws that developed over the past 100- plus years when they are seeing a lot of basic principles being violated.”
According to Bednar, the key task when teaching rule of law topics is helping students master existing statutes, apply them to various situations, and identify when someone has violated the rules. These lessons should underscore that all people are beholden to these laws set by society, while also “teaching students to value the law, even when they disagree with the policy outcome,” he adds. “I try to instill in my students that just because the president does something they don’t like, that doesn’t make it illegal. If you don’t like the president’s ability to do that, how do you fix it? That message is heightened now because we are observing a lot of situations where those rules are being broken.”
Jill Hasday, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Centennial Professor in Law, also lives that balance when teaching constitutional law courses that cover federalism, the Fourteenth Amendment, and separation of powers. She seeks to expand students’ knowledge of the country’s most important Supreme Court decisions so they can see how the Court’s rulings have evolved over the decades. For example, Hasday juxtaposes Trump v. United States (2024), which grants sweeping presidential immunity, with Clinton v. Jones (1997), which rejected President Clinton’s effort to postpone civil litigation against him until he was out of office.
“There are some recent Supreme Court decisions that diverge significantly from the Court’s past practices,” Hasday says.
“Part of my role is putting the Court’s recent decisions in historical context, so students can recognize long-standing themes while also appreciating what is new about the Court’s latest turns.”
Hasday often compares current and historical legal events to illustrate the cycles of progress and regression that have occurred throughout American history. She also emphasizes learning how to develop the best possible arguments for and against each side — key abilities no matter who lawyers are representing. “The law is never static,” Hasday says. “The point of law school is to prepare students to participate in the ongoing work of maintaining the rule of law, including by responding to new legal developments over time.”
Lately, when changes have been coming fast and furious, professors occasionally put their syllabus aside and help students understand what is occurring. Kristin Hickman, associate dean for research and intellectual life and McKnight Presidential Professor in Law, did that early in President Trump’s second term when he issued a stream of executive orders. During her legislation and regulation course, she spent one class session analyzing several orders with students, including assessing the authorizing statute and determining whether it supported the orders.
“It seemed artificial to come to class and talk about a three-part test for some statutory requirement in the midst of all of that going on,” Hickman says. “We very deliberately did not talk about the orders from the perspective of how we feel right now. I think that helped students understand more about what was happening by approaching the orders in an analytical way. It demonstrated how law can be a tool for understanding current events but also what we as attorneys could do if we found those orders problematic. When you’re living through periods of upheaval, having tools to help you make sense of events can be both reassuring and empowering.”
Helping students develop those lawyerly tools is a key component of Hickman’s teaching. Future lawyers need them to grapple with structural constitutional questions that have been debated for 250 years — such as how executive power interfaces with judicial and legislative powers — and then to argue cogently for their side. “As a lawyer, you have to be able to explain in legal terms exactly why something is a question of law. Does an action violate the Constitution, and if it does, what provision?” she says. “Then you can construct avenues for responding when the government does something you don’t like.”
When students graduate from Minnesota Law, they will require those skills and more to withstand major societal change, along with Americans’ increasing distrust of legal institutions and processes, says William McGeveran, dean and William S. Pattee Professor of Law. A hallmark of the Law School’s approach is equipping students to be nimble.
“A legal education is a really good toolkit to respond to uncertainty and change. These are major changes now, but other major changes have happened before,” McGeveran says, pointing to artificial intelligence and the effects of a highly polarized media landscape. “Students are coming in droves, and they are hungry to explore and engage with some of these really big challenges we’re facing. It’s our goal to help them do that.”
An Ethical Framework
Richard Painter, S. Walter Richey Professor of Corporate Law, teaches courses in ethics, presidential power, and professional responsibility. He believes it is “absolutely critical” to be an equal-opportunity critic of presidents from both parties when educating students about ethical breaches and the use and abuse of presidential power. “If you politicize an ethics course, the atmosphere deteriorates very quickly,” he adds.
Painter finds significant ground to cover when exploring the reaches of executive power. He highlights Republican and Democratic presidents who have tested the limits, including President Truman taking control of American steel mills, President Bush and the War on Terror, and President Biden’s student loan forgiveness efforts. This adds important context when he explores President Trump’s potential conflicts of interest.
Another of Painter’s courses focuses on professional responsibility for government attorneys. There, Painter underscores that “a government lawyer’s role is to interpret the law as faithfully as you can. You are representing the government, and your client is, in part, the law itself. You shouldn’t advise government officials to go to the limit of the law or over the limits.”
One integral component is staying ideologically neutral — even if professors have strong opinions, says Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law, who teaches constitutional law and law and technology. Rozenshtein shared that professors must also guide students to differentiate between profound policy disagreements and potential rule of law violations.
Concurrently, Rozenshtein noted that legal education must acknowledge how the current administration is breaking norms. “The legal profession cannot be neutral on the rule of law and neutral on the Constitution,” Rozenshtein says. “On any reasonable basis, this administration really is a massive threat to democracy and the rule of law, and one can’t ignore that. In teaching people to become lawyers, it would be a dereliction of my duties not to point that out.”
Rozenshtein uses the unenforced TikTok ban as a prime example of how he says President Trump is flouting the rule of law. Passed by Congress, signed into law by President Biden, and upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, the ban should be actively enforced under the law, Rozenshtein says. “It’s not the most important law of the land, but it’s the starkest rule of law issue. It’s the clearest example of the Trump Administration’s imperial conception of itself and view that it’s above the law.”
Nadia Anguiano ’17, associate clinical professor of law and director of the Law School’s Federal Immigration Litigation Clinic, wants her students to grapple with questions about what exactly the rule of law means, and who is benefiting from or being harmed by laws. There have been many times throughout U.S. history, she notes, where the rule of law was used to reinforce racial and social hierarchies, such as Jim Crow and anti-immigration measures.
“When most people think about the rule of law, they think it refers to the concept that all individuals, including government officials, are bound by and accountable under the law, which is supposed to be applied fairly, consistently, and equally,” Anguiano says. “What I emphasize is that traditional conceptions of the rule of law can be used to subordinate and subjugate people. In the clinic, we’re looking at the laws themselves, how these laws are being applied, and how they subordinate our clients.”
In March, students got an up-close view of Anguiano’s teachings when President Trump issued a memorandum aimed at immigration attorneys. It directs the U.S. Attorney General to investigate lawyers who have litigated cases against the federal government — as the clinic does — and take disciplinary action against lawyers that the attorney general deems to have engaged in “frivolous, unreasonable, or vexatious litigation” against the United States.
“This memo exemplifies that the rule of law can be manipulated and turned into a weapon of retribution,” Anguiano says. “I told students that I want them to understand the real risk associated with doing courageous work, where the government is explicitly investigating folks like us to intimidate and chill the work we do.” Despite the threat, the students chose to press on.
In the Field
Keith Ellison ’90, Minnesota Attorney General
Before any votes were cast in the 2024 election, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison ’90 and more than 20 other state attorneys general were preparing for a potential second Trump administration. They combed through the Project 2025 policy blueprint to identify areas of risk and relevant issues they could raise in court to stop actions they considered unlawful or unconstitutional.
When President Trump started issuing a torrent of executive orders, they were ready. Ellison and the Minnesota Attorney General’s office have played an integral role in more than 35 cases on issues from birthright citizenship to federal funding freezes to proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting. During the first Trump administration, a similar group of attorneys general, including Ellison, filed more than 100 lawsuits and won 83 percent of them, he says.
This year, Ellison created a new rule of law unit in his office to work on these cases, staffed with four lawyers and supported by more than two dozen others as needed. Generally, the lawsuits argue that the administration is violating the Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Administrative Procedures Act, separation of powers, or the doctrine of ultra vires (applicable when someone exceeds their legal authority).
“My position and the position of most people is that the things the president wants to do can be done, if you follow the proper procedure,” Ellison says. “Even with birthright citizenship, you can change the Fourteenth Amendment, but he didn’t do that. He impounded $3 trillion of spending that Congress appropriated to the states, and he doesn’t have the authority to redirect that money.”
At Minnesota Law, Ellison absorbed lessons that being a lawyer is a higher calling, and “that we should act ethically and with integrity,” he says. “When I took professional responsibility, professors taught us that everyone from the Law School should represent the best and noblest ideas of the profession, and it doesn’t matter what side you take. The legal profession is a guardian of democratic rule in our country.”
“I’m very proud of being a lawyer right now,” Ellison says. “I think ultimately, it’s lawyers who are protecting our country. It’s people who are speaking up about what [President Trump] is doing and the damage he is inflicting on the rule of law, and lawyers standing with people to protect their rights.”
Anthony Sanders ’04, Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice
Anthony Sanders ’04 has devoted his career to fighting for citizens’ constitutional protection from local, state, and federal governments. From engaging in public interest law litigation at a nonprofit firm to challenging abuses of constitutional liberties at the Institute for Justice, Sanders knows how to push back against government overreach.
Today, his work centers on educating the public through events, publications, and podcasts about judges’ role in guarding constitutional limits and liberties. Fighting constitutional overreach is a thread connecting Sanders’s career, especially in areas like free speech, private property rights, and economic liberty. “We are always challenging abuses of our constitutional liberties. In that sense, the current environment allows us to hold the government to account and push back on constitutional overreach — what people also call rule of law,” says Sanders, who is teaching an economic liberties course at Minnesota Law this fall.
Sanders doesn’t get deeply involved in litigation these days, but he does consult with co-workers on legal issues. The Institute recently filed a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act for unconstitutional detention on behalf of an American citizen and Iraq War veteran who was picked up and held for three days by ICE.
Alicia Granse ’19, Staff Attorney at ACLU of Minnesota
Alicia Granse ’19 works at the forefront of protecting Minnesotans’ civil liberties, such as fighting to stop a Minnesota school district from banning books. She joined the ACLU-MN after working as a public defender, because she wanted to ensure that federal and state constitutional protections are upheld for all. “People talk about whether individuals are doing things illegally, but they don’t have the same criticism when a government agency breaks the law,” Granse says. “Government agents who don’t follow the Constitution are breaking the law, and we should hold them accountable for that.”
This summer, the ACLU-MN logged a victory against the St. Francis Area School District after it banned dozens of books. The organization and co-counsel argued that the district’s actions violated the Minnesota Constitution and laws that forbid schools from banning books based on viewpoint. The ACLU-MN recently filed suit against Carver County, accusing it of illegally detaining a noncitizen so that he could be transferred to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
“We are litigating to ensure that people who are noncitizens still have the protections of law — that’s guaranteed,” Granse says. “We are focusing on ensuring that law enforcement and government agencies are only fulfilling the duties they are allowed to and not breaking the law.”