As a student at the University of Minnesota Law School in the mid-1990s, Susan Franck ’98 took a seminar called “Women in Law” taught by Professor Emerita Laura Cooper and Professor Emerita Carol Chomsky. For one assignment, the professors asked students to design an empirical project of their choosing. Franck decided to interview Cooper, the first woman to receive tenure at the Law School, and document her oral history.
“We did it on a Saturday sometime in the winter. I remember it was cold, and we had to walk across the Seven Corners to get coffee because we both needed caffeine,” Franck recalls. “Hearing her story was so profound. Afterward, looking at all the pictures on the wall in the faculty offices, I wondered, ‘Is there a space for me here?’”
Franck still keeps a copy of the paper she wrote, typos and all, in her desk drawer at American University, where she teaches classes on international business transactions, civil procedure, and transnational dispute settlement. She is one of many Minnesota Law alumni who chose the less conventional path of teaching after law school, inspired by their own professors who had an outsized impact on their careers.
After interviewing Cooper and reading Mary Joe Frug’s Postmodern Legal Feminism, Franck knew she wanted to teach one day.
“In between my first and second semesters, I realized law school isn’t just about the law,” she says. “It’s about understanding the pedagogy that they’re trying to teach you. Once that clicked in my head, everything changed.”
After graduation, Franck landed a competitive Fulbright grant to study international arbitration in London and worked in the United Kingdom and Washington, D.C., for several years. In 2004, she returned to Minnesota Law as a visiting associate professor and found herself across the hall from her former professors, who were now her colleagues.
From there, Franck taught at several other law schools around the country before landing at American, where she still uses teaching methods she learned from her favorite professors at Minnesota Law. One standout was Edward Adams, Howard E. Buhse Professor of Finance and Law, whose humorous exam questions — about “Seinfeld” and bankruptcy, for example — have stuck with her. For her own exams, Franck draws inspiration from cultural icons like Sofía Vergara and Beyoncé, as well as popular movies and TV shows, including “South Park.” She’s even developing a course that uses pop culture to encourage students to build practical legal skills, with input from a lawyer for celebrities.
“That was the Ed Adams’ hook,” Franck says. “Make sure that the questions are not a mental death trap and that you’re finding moments of joy or humor when reading through dense material.”
Charting a Path in Academia
For many alumni who become professors, the journey begins while they’re still students. Minnesota Law prides itself on the practical, hands-on learning provided in clinics and internships, but these alumni found the faculty equally welcoming their early interest in academia and offered mentorship.
Nicholas Bednar ’16, McKnight Land-Grant Professor, is a double Gopher who’s now in his fourth year on the faculty at Minnesota Law. He teaches legislation and regulation, policymaking, and torts. Bednar also has a Ph.D. in political science from Vanderbilt and researches presidential power, specifically the relationship between the president and employees in the executive branch — an area of expertise that has members of Congress calling him twice a week.
“I happened to be one of the few people to understand the law behind what was going on when the Trump administration started to fire everyone,” Bednar says. “A cool thing about being an academic is that if you are fortunate — or unfortunate — enough to have your topic become a big deal, you can help educate the public about what is going on and what’s lawful and unlawful.”
After law school, Bednar spent two years as a judicial clerk and decided that he wanted to work in academia rather than practice at a firm. He’s motivated less by client work and more by asking questions, reading historical documents, and doing statistical analysis. Bednar says his professors helped prepare him for an academic route while he was a student. He co-wrote research papers with them and describes the experience as working with colleagues rather than a professor and research assistant. Today, he gives his students the same opportunity.
“Minnesota Law is known for being very collegial and also having a very intellectually strong faculty who are engaged with ideas,” Bednar says. “Being back here is my dream job.”
As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Keith Richotte Jr. ’04 took a class in American Studies that changed his life. Richotte, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, says the professor gave him a vocabulary to describe how he saw and understood the world. At the end of the semester, the professor wrote on his final paper, “You should think about grad school or law school.” Richotte decided to do both. He pursued a Ph.D. in American Studies while enrolled at Minnesota Law.
Richotte knew he didn’t want to be a practicing lawyer, but he wanted to learn as much as possible about the law. He took as many “weird classes” as he could, such as jurisprudence and theory of punishment — any class where he could write a paper.
“I was more interested in the legal education than I was in making sure I mastered the nuts and bolts of lawyering,” Richotte says. “It gave me a sense of freedom as a law student to explore. Even for folks who are truly devoted to being practicing attorneys, I think they would do well to allow themselves to be students during those three years.”
Today, Richotte is an associate justice on his tribe’s appellate court and serves as chief justice of the Spirit Lake Nation’s appellate court. He also teaches at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law and directs the university’s Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program. He has written several books on Indigenous law, most recently The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution (2025).
At one of the world’s most prominent Indigenous law programs, Richotte spends his days with students like himself from around the world. Like his undergraduate professor at the University of Minnesota, he inspires more of them than he often realizes, sometimes getting emails years later from students thanking him for the impact he’s had on their careers.
“It’s a really nice reminder that the stuff we’re doing as professors is really valuable and does have an effect on students,” Richotte says. “It helps you keep going in a profession where there isn’t a lot of instant gratification. When you have glimpses of those moments, it’s really satisfying and makes it feel very worthwhile.”
Outside the Ivory Tower
What Heather Abraham ’12 values most in her work as a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, which is part of the State University of New York, is combining practice and teaching. Recently promoted to the rank of professor of law with tenure, Abraham directs the law school’s Civil Rights and Housing Clinic, where she works on real cases with students and focuses on client service, litigation strategy, and law firm management.
When she enrolled at Minnesota Law, she also earned a joint master’s degree from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs; Abraham set her sights on a career in public policy. Growing up in Mankato, she was strongly influenced by one of her high school teachers, Gov. Tim Walz. After college, she served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala and then worked for Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Capitol Hill. In law school, Abraham was galvanized by a fair housing class taught by Myron Orfield, Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law. Her later work as his research assistant directly shaped her scholarship in fair housing and civil rights litigation today. A pivotal moment came when she worked with Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid housing attorney Dorinda Wider to help a mother escape domestic violence by transferring her housing voucher to another community — a difficult lift that required relentless advocacy.
These experiences solidified Abraham’s plan to practice housing law as an attorney until she discovered the clinical teaching fellowship program at Georgetown University Law Center.
“After two weeks as a teaching fellow, I knew that this was a job for me,” Abraham says. “I wanted to keep practicing but also work shoulder to shoulder with students. It was meaningful, practical work that really opened my eyes to having a foot in practice and in teaching.”
Abraham finds the most meaning in her work with students when she helps them reignite their hope for the world. She sees clinical teaching as a way to reconnect them with the convictions that first drew them to the law.
Rick Weinmeyer ’13 also pursued a joint master’s program in bioethics alongside his law degree. Like Abraham, he initially planned to work in policy. But as he stacked up degrees — eventually earning a Ph.D. from Northwestern University — and saw conversations about public health proliferating in the news and in policy discussions, he realized academia was the right path for him. Faculty at Minnesota Law, including Francis Shen, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Irving Younger Professor in Law; Jill Hasday, Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Centennial Professor in Law; Kristin Hickman, McKnight Presidential Professor of Law and Distinguished McKnight University Professor; and Susanna Blumenthal, William L. Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History, encouraged him to follow his interests and consider an academic career.
“There were some destructive forces happening in public health and health policy at that time,” Weinmeyer says. He started his Ph.D. program the same year that Sen. John McCain voted decisively against efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “It was clear that the writing was on the wall, and I thought someone should probably be trying to work on those issues.”
Today, Weinmeyer is an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a member of the Beazley Institute for Health Law and Policy, where he teaches classes on public health law, health law, and torts. His research examines public health policy on sanitation, infectious disease, and issues related to health and dignity. This includes laws around access to and availability of public toilets, a topic he admits is “unsexy” but vital.
Weinmeyer challenges his students to ask why things are the way they are, and then teaches them how they might create change through the law.
“Public health is a service and a force for good in the United States,” Weinmeyer says. “Everything that has helped to improve our lives in terms of health and well-being has been shaped by the law and the firm belief that we’re all in this together.”
As a student at Minnesota Law, Weinmeyer helped recruit Allison Whelan ’15, a fellow joint-degree student in bioethics. She is now an assistant professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, where she teaches classes on reproductive rights and justice, administrative law, food and drug law, and legislation and regulation. She is currently working on a book about reproduction and the administrative state that covers topics from abortion and contraception to pregnancy and maternal mortality.
After law school, Whelan clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First and Second Circuits and then worked in food and drug law at a D.C. firm. A few years later, she entered academia as a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
For Whelan, the appeal of academia is having the time and intellectual freedom to research and write in the areas she cares about most. While most conversations on reproductive health policy focus on the Supreme Court or Congress, Whelan’s research looks at the lesser-known role of government agencies and unelected officials. Her work influences not only policymakers but also the future lawyers in her classroom.
“Being a professor means I’m not just teaching students how the law works, but I’m actively engaging in the conversations that shape what the law should become,” she says. “My students actually push me to think about them in ways that I wouldn’t on my own.”
Aside from her research interests, Whelan was motivated to work in academia to pay it forward. Classes with June Carbone, Robina Chair in Law, Science and Technology, on assisted reproduction and the law, and with Professor Jill Hasday on constitutional law, helped shape her passion. Her professors also guided Whelan as she figured out her career path. Since no one in her family had gone to law school or worked in academia, that guidance was instrumental in her success.
Whelan loves helping her students find clerkships and gain practical experience, which helps them get a job after graduation and lets them explore their interests, as she did at Minnesota Law.
“Part of my desire to teach grew out of my desire to demystify the pathway and to mentor, advise, and offer research and learning opportunities to students who might not otherwise see a clear route into the legal profession,” she says. “I love being able to make these connections and open doors for students. That’s what my professors did for me.