News

Emily Franco, 3L, has received the President’s Student Leadership and Service Award for her role in establishing a food pantry in Mondale Hall in order to serve the needs of Minnesota Law’s student community. 

Mondale Kitchen was designed to provide time-pressed law students with 24/7 access to shelf-stable nonperishables, single-serving ready-to-eat foods, and fresh produce. The goal is to ensure all students have the nutritious food they need to advance their academic, professional, and social success. 

3Ls Meghan Knapp and Jackie Fielding have been named 2020 Robina Post-Graduate Fellows.

Robina Post-Graduate Fellowships are supported by the Robina Foundation in recognition of the need for greater funding for recent graduates who want to pursue public interest work. These highly competitive fellowships provide funding for fellows to work full-time, for one year, in a legal or policy role at a nonprofit or government agency.

A team with three Minnesota Law 3Ls fared well in the University of Minnesota’s inaugural interdisciplinary Health Data Competition, placing third out of a total of 16 teams.

The competition required students to explore the Minnesota Department of Health’s new prescription drug public use files and provide innovative insights, analysis, and recommendations based on their findings. 

Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice recently launched a series of online video interviews with faculty, practitioners, and other legal experts about a variety of issues affecting law and inequality during COVID-19.

The interviews, conducted by students on the journal’s editorial staff, includes discussion of the pandemic’s impact on domestic violence, reproductive rights, the rights of incarcerated people, the state of public defense in Minnesota, and issues facing immigrants, as well as evictions and other housing-related matters.

Minnesota Women Lawyers has announced that 3L Meghan Knapp is the recipient of the 2020 Equal Justice Award.

The annual award invites for a paper submitted by a Minnesota law student on a topic involving law and social justice.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and statewide stay-at-home order, business is booming for a Minnesota Law program that offers free legal advice sessions to local small business owners.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed many things about the United States, not least of which is the frayed condition of its societal safety nets. But a collaboration between the University of Minnesota Law School and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is putting at ease some worries for farm workers in upstate New York.

When Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin reached out to her research assistants and asked who would be interested in helping to develop a worldwide tracker of governmental responses to the COVID-19 outbreak, 2Ls Abby Oakland and Seiko Shastri jumped at the opportunity.

Professor Jill Hasday’s book, Intimate Lies and the Law, has won the 2020 Scribes Book Award “for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.”

Scribes, the American Society of Legal Writers, has presented this award since 1961. Each year, the honor goes to a single work selected from a highly competitive field.

Thomas B. Poch ’67, who served for 15 years as a judge in Minnesota’s 1st Judicial District and as an assistant Ramsey County attorney for nearly three decades before that, died peacefully in his sleep at Breck Homes in Bloomington on March 15. He was 77 and had been diagnosed with dementia.

Poch joined the office of the Ramsey County Attorney shortly after earning his J.D. from the Law School. During his 29 years in that office, he headed up the Criminal Division and the Crimes Against Persons Unit, among other leadership roles.