Volume 42, Issue 1

The merger of William Mitchell College of Law and Hamline University School of Law is exceptional news for the legal community in Minnesota, for current and prospective students, and for our country’s legal system. Our federal judges, a number of whom are graduates of the two law schools, look forward to the merger and the…

For more than 150 combined  years, Hamline University School of Law and William Mitchell College of Law have left an indelible mark on Minnesota’s legal community. Graduates of these institutions reached the highest halls of power, litigated the most complex of cases, served our criminal justice system as both accomplished prosecutors and successful defense attorneys,…

It is a distinct pleasure and a true honor to help introduce the first-ever joint law review issue of the Mitchell Hamline School of Law. As readers should well know, Mitchell Hamline School of Law is the result of the combination of William Mitchell College of Law (with a history dating back to 1900) with…

On December 10, 2015, Hamline University School of Law and William Mitchell College of Law combined to create the largest law school in Minnesota. This was a historic step in the history of legal education in America, and it elevated the newly created law school, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, to the forefront of legal…

In 1974 the William Mitchell Law Review had no past, and its future was in grave doubt. Recently founded Hamline Law School had no law review. Today’s Mitchell Hamline Law Review was beyond imagining. I remember when the William Mitchell Law Review had a short past and a still uncertain future. I knew that publishing…

What did it take to start a new law review and, more to the point, what did it take when the law school itself was brand new? The circumstances surrounding the launch of the Hamline Law Review in 1978 were strikingly different than those surrounding this new combination with the William Mitchell Law Review in…

17 U.S.C. § 106 states: [T]he owner of [a] copyright . . . has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly; . . . and…

A few decades ago, a tattoo was something you got in one of three places: in jail, in the Navy, or as part of your initiation into a motorcycle gang. Today, tattoos are something you get as a form of self-expression, on your eighteenth birthday, on a drunken whim, or on a reality television show…

In its haste to take Internet service providers off the hook for infringement, the [Garcia] court . . . rob[bed] performers and other creative talent of rights Congress gave them. I won’t be a party to it – Judge Alex Kozinski If a person sends a minimally creative, original e-mail to a friend, that writing…

“For students who enter law school with less strong LSAT scores, academic backgrounds, and analytical skills, then, how well they do on the bar exam will reflect how well the law school acted to provide necessary academic support.” For too long, academic support programs have been viewed as the unwanted stepchild of legal education. These…

I have been fortunate to work with a number of law students who have substantially outperformed traditional predictors of academic success and bar passage, including the students’ scores on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and their undergraduate grade point averages (UGPA). Over the years, I became convinced that there are attributes among students that…

As law schools downsize their faculty to offset falling student enrollment, faculty members will likely face greater teaching loads and increased pressure to produce graduates who can not only pass the bar, but are “practice ready.” Formative assessment, prompt and individualized feedback, mentoring, and one-on-one conferences are all integral to achieving those goals. As a…

Many legal positivists no longer deny that there is a necessary connection between law and morality. This concession, however, leaves positivism’s other theses intact. Positivism’s central thesis is that, whether always the case, typically the case, or the case in at least one legal system, moral justification does not supply the criteria by which a…

“[T]he practice of medicine is not a business and can never be one . . . . Our fellow creatures cannot be dealt with as a man deals in corn and coal” “The virtue-based physician could never see his patient as a ‘customer,’ consumer, insured life or any other commercialized, industrialized transformations of the ancient…

Throughout the history of zoning in America, laws have operated to balance the interests of government, developers, and homeowners to develop optimal living environments and maintain property values through a fair process. Zoning laws reflect the socially and culturally constructed “societal consensus” regarding what land uses are “normal and expected, decent, and desirable.” While developers,…

The right of the people to be free from unreasonable governmental searches and seizures guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment remains one of the most relevant, and intensely contested, protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights. In the post- 9/11 world, the difficulty of balancing governmental power with individual liberty has become more apparent than ever.…

The Minnesota Supreme Court recently held in Medical Staff of Avera Marshall Regional Medical Center v. Avera Marshall that medical staff bylaws constitute an enforceable contract between a hospital and its medical staff. Finding no preexisting duties, the majority determined that medical staff bylaws hold sufficient consideration to create an enforceable contract. This case note…

The Minnesota Supreme Court recently held that a warrant is not required to perform a breath test of an individual arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated because such a search falls into the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment. In so concluding, the court also held that a statute criminalizing…

In Schmitz v. U.S. Steel Corp., a divided Minnesota Supreme Court held that the state constitutional right to a jury trial applied to individuals bringing suit under the retaliatory discharge provision of the Workers’ Compensation Act (WCA). The court determined, as a matter of law, that the nature of the controversy overrode the default presumption…