News

Sonia Sotomayor, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, visited the University of Minnesota Law School in late October. She was in Minneapolis for the investiture of the Honorable Elizabeth Bentley to the Minnesota State Court of Appeals and visited the Law School during her stay in the Twin Cities.

The University of Minnesota Law School is pleased to announce Vinita R. Singh will join the faculty as an associate professor of law in the fall of 2025. Professor Singh studies economic statecraft, with an emphasis on examining how federal income taxation can be used to advance U.S. foreign policy and national security goals. 

The University of Minnesota Law School is pleased to announce that Samuel J. Merchant will join the faculty in the fall of 2025 as an associate professor of law. Merchant is currently a visiting assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where he teaches constitutional law, criminal procedure, sentencing, and Habeas Corpus. He is also a research fellow at the Georgetown Law Center for the Constitution.

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. Before joining Minnesota Law, he was an associate professor of law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. He teaches and writes in the areas of administrative law and constitutional law.

Charlotte Garden has been appointed the Gray, Plant, Mooty, Mooty & Bennett Professor of Law. She joined Minnesota Law in 2022 and teaches and writes in the areas of labor law, employment law, and constitutional law. She has published over 25 journal articles and book chapters on these topics, along with casebooks and edited volumes.

Kayla Gillespie ’25 is the recipient of the Minnesota Women Lawyers (MWL) 2024 Social Justice Writing Award. This award will be presented at MWL's 30th Annual Rosalie Wahl Leadership Lecture on November 14th in recognition of her paper “Bostock, the Safe Streets Act, and Protecting LGBTQ People from Discriminatory Policing.”

Minnesota Law alum Amy Cohen ’24 received an honorable mention in recognition of her paper entitled “From Powell to Present: Defining the Right to Counsel Beyond Rothgery.”

Meet Alessandra Wilson, a 3L at Minnesota Law, who is deeply passionate about public service. Wilson’s decision to attend law school stemmed from a deep desire to tackle systemic injustices and provide direct legal support to those who need it most. “As a Mexican American, I grew up witnessing the challenges that non-majority communities face when trying to access legal resources,” Wilson shares. “I knew I wanted to be an advocate for those communities, and attending law school felt like the most effective way to make a difference.

Professor Alan Rozenshtein has been named a nonresident senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings. He is also a senior editor and the research director for Lawfare.