News

Dear Law School Community: 

I am writing to follow up on President Gabel’s message about the recent killing of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota resident Daunte Wright, yet another unarmed Black man killed by the police. I’m saddened and angry that our community must yet again endure this incredible personal pain.

James R. Cho '99 has been appointed a U.S. magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York.

Minnesota Law 1s Tony Sanchez, Emanual Williams, and Mica Standing Soldier were recently hired for three newly created public-interest clerkships at the Legal Rights Center. Now and through the summer they will coordinate public education and civic engagement efforts relating to the trials of Derek Chauvin and the other three former Minneapolis police officers charged in the killing of George Floyd. The clerkships are part of a unique collaboration between the LRC and Minnesota Law.

Mirella Ceja-Orozco, along with Elizer Darris, was recently appointed co-executive director of the Minnesota Freedom Fund. MFF’s mission is to end cash bail in the State of Minnesota and provide bail relief in the interim. The group, once operating on a shoestring, made national headlines last summer when it received more than $30 million in donations in the wake of the civil unrest following the brutal killing of George Floyd.

Four Minnesota Law students recently coordinated and participated in high-level policy discussions with members of the Biden transition team and incoming administration as part of the 2021 Summit for Civil Rights.

Read about the students' experience, which included connecting with a cabinet nominee and Biden transition team leaders, in a special online extra in the digital edition of Minnesota Law magazine.

Garry W. Jenkins, dean and William S. Pattee Professor of Law, has been named to the board of directors of Equal Justice Works, the nation’s largest nonprofit that supports law students and lawyers in launching public interest legal careers.  

Those in search of future goodwill ambassadors for the Law School need look no further than Yu-Chen and Ruby Wang, an enterprising couple from Taiwan who have already earned two Minnesota law degrees and are working on a third. Currently riding out the pandemic in their Minneapolis home, they are busy studying, changing diapers, and contemplating careers that promise to be impressive.

Brandie Burris, 2L, was recently elected editor-in-chief of Minnesota Law Review. She is the first Black student to hold that position in the publication’s 104-year history. 

Read more in digital version of Minnesota Law, the Law School's magazine.

Moderate clergymen had urged Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to show restraint in 1963, to not protest segregation in Alabama’s biggest city. King, along with colleagues Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others, ignored those pleas. When King was arrested, then locked inside a cell, he composed a response.

Professor Perry Moriearty, Kaitlyn Falk, 2L, and Matthew DiTullio ’20 played key roles in gaining freedom for Myon Burrell, who earlier this week was granted a commutation of a life sentence that he received as a teen.

As student attorneys in the Child Advocacy and Juvenile Justice Clinic., Falk and DiTullio worked “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Moriearty, spending hours gathering information, writing and speaking to Burrell, his family and supporters to prepare a petition seeking Burrell’s release for the Minnesota Board of Pardons.