A surrogacy thriller. A George Washington novel. A backpacking memoir set across the former Soviet states. A reckoning with ALS. These six Minnesota Law alumni share a degree and a second calling as published authors. Here are their stories, and the books that grew out of them.
Katie R. Aune ’01
Finding Katya: How I Quit Everything to Backpack the Former Soviet States (Katie R. Aune, 2023)
Somewhere along her journey through all 15 former Soviet Union states, Katie R. Aune stopped using her own name. Instead, she introduced herself as Katya, the Russian equivalent.
“It kind of morphed into Finding Katya as I was thinking about the title of the book,” says Aune, who notes Katie was hard for some to pronounce. “It was a play on finding myself, finding this other side of me.”
In 2011, after a career pivot from tax law to fundraising followed by a bad breakup, Aune boarded a one-way flight and spent 13 months backpacking from St. Petersburg to Tajikistan, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the deserts of Turkmenistan. She’d blogged her way through the trip, writing multiple posts a week, back when travel blogging was new, captivating readers with her honesty about the hard parts. Finding Katya grew out of those posts, though it took a pandemic’s worth of time and a developmental editor to help pull it together.
By the time she finished the book, the Ukraine she’d traveled through was at war. She went back and added more about the country, giving readers a deeper look beyond the headlines.
“I wrote my book because I wanted to introduce readers to traveling in lesser-known parts of the world,” says Aune, who focused on Russian and Eastern European studies in college. “I wanted to inspire people to embark on their own adventures.”
She adds, “I went into the trip expecting to have some giant ‘aha’ moment where I’d discover what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. That didn’t happen.”
What did happen for Aune was an increase in confidence and newfound patience in dealing with adversity.
“I had always been very type A, following the plan,” she says. “Coming out of the trip, I was more flexible, more open, more resilient when things didn’t go my way.”
Her time at Minnesota Law left a mark on the book. In a journal article back in law school, she argued that the Baltic states would one day join the European Union (which they did). And the writing itself drew on lessons from the classroom: “People complain about legal writing class,” she says, “but it’s probably the most important one you take.”
Aune now lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves as director of philanthropy for the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Northern Kenya. And there might be another book in it: she’s been to 16 of Africa’s 54 countries, and she’d love to backpack the rest.
Carolyn Chalmers ’77
They Don’t Want Her There: Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University (University of Iowa Press, 2022)
After retiring as director of the Office for Conflict Resolution at the University of Minnesota, Carolyn Chalmers began auditing creative writing classes at the U, finding her way back to her English literature roots and discovering a new outlet for a case she couldn’t stop thinking about. Encouraged by her instructor and classmates to keep going, she wrote They Don’t Want Her There: Fighting Sexual and Racial Harassment in the American University.
“I was interested in the challenge of trying to write not the kind of writing you do for a legal brief, but the kind of writing you do that people read when they’re sitting on their couch,” she says.
The book documents Chalmers’ experience representing Jean Jew, M.D., a Chinese American tenured associate professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Medicine, in a landmark sex discrimination lawsuit that predated Anita Hill and the #MeToo movement by decades. The legal fight included a university investigation, a federal trial and a state court jury trial.
The stakes had been enormous, the legal terrain uncertain.
“We had to convince judges that the way we were reading the law was something they should adopt,” says Chalmers. “That felt like a risky thing.”
Chalmers’ interest in this work traced back to law school, particularly Alan Freeman’s civil rights class, which she credits with introducing her to the Civil Rights Act and its litigation possibilities.
“This was the case that took so much of my time and heart and soul,” she says. The book also reconnected her with Jew. “That was very satisfying — getting back in touch with Jean, working with her on the book, having her permission to review the files. That reopened an ongoing relationship with her that I had previously let lapse.”
The timing of the book’s 2022 publication wasn’t accidental. Chalmers had been watching coverage of E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Donald Trump and noticing how little of the procedural reality came through.
“Most of the people reading those articles didn’t have a clue what it all meant,” she says. “For law students, I wanted to tell a story about the density of responsibility and persistence that’s required. And the non-law reader, I hoped, might learn something that would help them read the paper better.”
Three years after its publication, the University of Iowa chose the book as its One Community, One Book selection.
Chalmers is currently writing a family history. It’s not for publication this time, but for her children and grandchildren. Another story worth getting down before it’s lost.
Toni Halleen ’88
The Surrogate (HarperCollins, 2021) and The Good Samaritan (HarperCollins, 2025)
At Toni Halleen’s first creative writing class at the Loft Literary Center, the instructor passed around a bag of postcards for inspiration and then gave the students three minutes to write. Halleen drew a snowy cabin scene with “Wisconsin” written on the front. Soon she was writing about a young couple arguing while hiding with a baby that wasn’t theirs.
"I didn't know where this came from," says Halleen, who runs the law firm Schaefer Halleen with her husband, Lawrence Schaefer ’88. "It was like I was reading something. I didn't feel I was in control of it. I was just discovering it as my hand moved."
A writer since childhood, Halleen sharpened her skills through stand-up comedy, improv and plays, including penning a Twin Cities Fringe Festival musical titled Soulless Bloodsucking Lawyers. She didn't seriously pursue a novel until her 40s, after a family therapist suggested it.
Ten years after the postcard prompt, she finished The Surrogate — a novel about a surrogate who changes her mind and goes on the run in northern Minnesota, and the couple trying to find their baby. As she queried literary agents, she set a goal of 100 rejections.
“I expected a lot of rejections — I was proud of them,” she says. “Being a lawyer helped me develop a thick skin. When you appear before a judge and they turn down your motion, you can’t take it personally.”
Turns out, it only took her 44 “nos” before getting a “yes” from an agent who helped her land a two-book deal with HarperCollins. The Surrogate was released in 2021, followed by The Good Samaritan in 2025.
The law school connection to her first book ran deeper than she initially realized. Halleen had taken family law with Professor Judith Younger in the late '80s, just as the Baby M surrogacy case, the first in the United States to address surrogate custody, was captivating the country.
"I wasn't thinking about Baby M when I saw that postcard," says Halleen, who’s currently working on a novel about neighbors and city ordinances. "But it ended up being inspired by that. I drew from the tension between my belief in the law and the crazy things people do that confound our legal system every day."
Writing gave Halleen the freedom to explore what falls outside the law.
Robert Ranum ’83
Clinical Trial: An ALS Memoir of Science, Hope, and Love (SparkPress, 2021)
Robert and Laura Ranum’s relationship isn’t just a love story – it’s a lifesaving one. Robert spent his career in corporate law, working for Fredrikson & Byron in business and securities law. His wife, Laura, is a scientist studying neurodegenerative diseases like ALS.
When Robert was diagnosed with ALS in 2016, the disease had already taken his mother and others in his family. Ten years later, against the weight of that family history, he's still here, and he credits much of that to Laura's research at the University of Florida, where she is a professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology and directs the Center for NeuroGenetics.
His wife’s decades of work and his diagnosis turned out to be bound together in ways neither could have planned. Clinical Trial is his attempt to make sense of it. The book’s title is inspired by the clinical trial at the center of his story and the hope that Laura’s research, and science like it, might change the odds for patients like him.
"She's saved my life in more than one way," says Robert.
After his diagnosis, Robert started keeping a journal. He found writing to be a more disciplined kind of thinking, a way to sort through what he was feeling. Eventually, he had a memoir on his hands but found the hardest part of writing the book wasn’t reflecting on his story but sharing it with the world.
"To write a book is intimidating," he says. "You're naked. But the desire to leave something behind overcame that inhibition.”
He adds: “I wanted to leave something for my family that tells a bit about my story and the details of my life. It tells how much I love my family, and the story of Laura’s work and the hope it provides for ALS patients.”
Robert acknowledges his ambition as a young lawyer and the work that provided the finances for a comfortable life. After 35 years of practicing law, he knows exactly what he's proudest of, and it isn't the companies he helped build. It's his family. Clinical Trial is a love letter to them.
“I wanted to tell my story and hope that people might laugh and enjoy the adventure – every life is an adventure,” he says. “I have concluded that my career was good, but I am most proud of my family and my kids. I wanted to proclaim that from the pages of my book.”
Keith Richotte Jr. ’04
The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution (Stanford University Press, 2025)
In a Supreme Court dissent last November, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued the Court should reconsider United States v. Kagama, the 1886 case establishing the federal government’s “plenary power” over Native peoples and nations. Gorsuch called the doctrine “a theory that should make this Court blush.” On page four of his dissent, he cited a brand-new book by Keith Richotte Jr.
For two decades, Richotte had been carrying the same question Gorsuch raised concerning a quiet shift in American law. When the Supreme Court first articulated plenary power in Kagama, the Court openly acknowledged there was no constitutional basis for it but held the government had it anyway. By 2004, the Court was claiming the authority had been there in the Commerce Clause all along.
Somewhere in between, Richotte realized, a story had been rewritten.
“For years I wanted to know when plenary power became constitutional,” he says. “So, I decided to finally find out.”
The answer became The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told. Richotte — a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona — frames the constitutional sleight of hand through the lens of Indigenous trickster stories.
“It tries to explain a natural order of things, that plenary power comes from the Constitution,” Richotte says. “But it’s not really explaining the natural world. It’s trying to explain how the effects of colonialism and racism are justified by the foundational document of the United States.”
The book is deliberately unlike a typical work of constitutional law scholarship. It’s accessible to readers without legal training. It has stories framed within stories. It is, by Richotte’s design, funny — a counterweight to what he calls a relentlessly depressing area of law.
“My modest goal for the book is to merely completely and fully reinvent the totality of federal Indian law,” he deadpans.
The book has won two PROSE Awards and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award, and Gorsuch’s citation suggests people are paying attention. To help that conversation along, he recently launched the Supreme Court Indian Law database website (SCILDB.com) that catalogs every Indian law case the Court has ever decided.
“There was a receptiveness to the idea that we need to quit telling the same bad story about plenary power,” he says, “and re-articulate the relationship between the federal government and Native America.”
Steve Yoch ’90
Becoming George Washington (Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2016) and Becoming Benedict Arnold (Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2024)
It was the middle of the night when George Washington showed up in Steve Yoch’s head. The scene came fully formed: Washington in a tent on the Virginia campaign, sweltering and irritable, his officers bursting in to tell him he’d won his House of Burgesses seat. There was even a joke with one of the officers cracking wise about why the good Lord invented alcohol.
“That moment of dialogue, I’ll never forget,” says Yoch, a partner at Felhaber Larson in St. Paul. “I almost wanted to wake up my wife. It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever experienced.”
A writer for decades before turning to historical fiction, Yoch had published dozens of articles and co-edited a two-volume book on real estate law. Then, in 2014, he stumbled upon the story of Washington’s early life, including an affair with Sally Fairfax, his role in sparking the French and Indian War, and the fame that came in his 20s. He set out to bring it all to life. Driven and disciplined, he wrote Becoming George Washington in a year without typing a word.
At 27, Yoch lost the use of his arms to a cascading thoracic compression in his neck, a condition that caused him daily pain. He dictates everything from legal briefs to novels.
“I choose to see the glass half full,” he says. “I can’t type. I have a lot of pain. But it ended up being a net positive for me... writing let me do things that my body wasn’t allowing me to do.”
Decades of lawyering also shaped both books, especially in their research. Becoming Benedict Arnold, at its peak, had 1,400 footnotes, which Yoch condensed into extensive author’s notes, distinguishing documented history from imagined dialogue. It was research-heavy because the historical record on Arnold is thinner, says Yoch.
“Good lawyering is really about taking complex issues and making them interesting and accessible,” says Yoch. The same goes for writing a novel, he says. If you can’t make the story compelling, whether it’s a judge, jury or reader, you’re not going to win.
Yoch is currently working on a novel about the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution, told from eight points of view. That’s a lot of new voices – he’s ready to listen.