News

Warren Francis Plunkett ’48, who served for 26 years as a judge in Minnesota’s 3rd Judicial District, died Dec. 30 in Austin, Minnesota, of complications from pneumonia. He was 98.

An interdisciplinary immigration-data-collection project proposed by Professor Linus Chan and Jack DeWaard, professor of sociology in the College of Liberal Arts, has received a faculty research award.

The title of the newly funded project is “Promoting Transparency and Engagement in U.S. Immigration Court by Ensuring the Quality and Utility of Data Collected by Volunteer Observers.” The University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Initiative approved $47,087 in funding for the 2019 calendar year.

Minnesota Law is home to a very vibrant community of international students from around the globe. One of those students is Natacha Garcia from Caracas, Venezuela, who first came to Minnesota Law in 2016 to get her LL.M. After completing that program, she enrolled in our J.D. program and is currently a 3L.

Why did you choose Minnesota Law when you originally came here for your LL.M. degree?

Governor-Elect Tim Walz appointed Nancy Leppink ’85 as commissioner of the Department of Labor and Industry.

Leppink is currently chief of labour administration with the Labour Inspection and Occupational Safety and Health Branch of the International Labour Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

Leppink has more than 25 years’ experience as a strategist and leader in employment and labor policy, law, administration, enforcement and compliance. Her experience includes work at the international, national, and state levels working with public, private and non-profit sectors

Minnesota Gov.-elect Tim Walz has appointed Rebecca Lucero ’07 as commissioner of the state’s Department of Human Rights. 

Lucero currently serves as the public policy director at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits.

Professor Allan Erbsen was recently elected to membership in the American Law Institute.

ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. The group drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles of Law that are enormously influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.

Erbsen joins about 20 fellow faculty members currently teaching at Minnesota Law who have been elected to ALI membership.

The Law School’s magazine, known for the last 13 years as Perspectives, has undergone a name change. Starting with the current issue (Fall 2018), the magazine’s new name is Minnesota Law.

“We renamed the magazine Minnesota Law to more closely align it to the Law School’s branding and better connect it to the Law School community,” said Dean Garry W. Jenkins in a letter to readers in the inaugural edition of Minnesota Law.

Welcome to a new version of your alumni magazine! As you may recall, our award-winning alumni magazine was formerly called Perspectives, a name it has borne since fall 2005. Prior to that, the magazine’s title was Law Alumni News. Today we rename the magazine Minnesota Law, to more closely align it with the Law School’s branding and better connect to our Law School community. After 13 years in the same format, the time also seemed right to freshen and modernize the look and feel of the magazine. We hope you like it, and, as always, we welcome your feedback.

At all levels of education, meaningful teacher feedback is crucial to a student’s growth. But until recently, law schools seldom gave students more than a cold letter grade on exams weeks, if not months, after the completion of their first-semester core classes.

When Troy Bader ’88 launched his legal career 30 years ago, his long-term interest was in a transactional practice. His immediate impulse, though, was to get into the courtroom and try cases.