www.wmitchell.edu The Mitchell Fellows Program
Practical Wisdom and Wide-Ranging Concerns
Professors and the Mitchell Fellows Program
It’s the extraordinary caliber of our faculty that ensures the quality of our Fellows Program. Participating faculty have a passion for the law, concern with social change, and ability to blend scholarly accomplishment with real-world experience.
Listed below are some of the faculty members participating in the program with descriptions of their current or recent projects.
Professor A. Kimberley Daytonis a pioneer in the growing elder law field and has helped define how the legal community thinks about aging and the law. Her current research uses a cross-cultural approach to elder law to expose the ugly, inevitable issue of rationing end-of-life health care expenditures.
Professor Carolyn Grose has been expanding the concepts of “reflective lawyering” to equip lawyers to better understand and represent clients whose stories may be difficult for others to understand (whether the client is, for example, a transgendered teacher or a transnational corporation).
Professor C. Peter Erlinderis a lead defense counsel in the U.N. Rwanda war crimes trial, and has forced disclosure of thousands of previously secret U.N. documents that reveal an entirely different story of the massacres.
Professor Daniel S. Kleinberger, director of the Mitchell Fellows Program,
has been immersed in legislative drafting work for more than two decades,
with projects ranging from the Minnesota Plain Language Contracts Act to
the Uniform Limited Partnership Act. Currently, he is a co-reporter for and
principal drafter of the Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act.
Professor Peter B. Knapp, co-director of the clinical program, each year at the request of the Minnesota Supreme Court, reviews and analyzes its decisions for the past year, for annual presentation to all state trial and appellate judges.
Professor Kenneth L. Port, director of Intellectual Property Law Studies, a two-time Fulbright Scholar to Japan, and a former advisor to the Kingdom of Jordan on trademark issues, seeks to persuade policymakers in both Japan and the United States that trademark protection 1) functions properly when it allows producers to "short cut" product source identification (thereby protecting consumers from deceit and lowering search costs) but 2) betrays a dark side as legislatures attempt to expand this right beyond its common law origins.
Professor Afsheen John Radsan, former federal prosecutor and assistant general counsel at the CIA, founded and now directs the National Security Forum at William Mitchell. The Forum has been leading a national debate on the balance between liberty and security in a world of global terrorism and has sponsored public events with speakers ranging from the former inspector general to the CIA to the author of Black Hawk Down.
Professor Eileen A. Scallen, a national expert on evidence, civil procedure, and rhetoric, is lead counsel in a breach of contract and discrimination lawsuit against a major newspaper that refused to publish an advertisement for a Gay Pride festival because the advertisement showed two men kissing.
Professor Niels B. Schaumann , an expert in copyright law, is working to restore balance to the copyright system and has informally advised the U.S. senator who chaired a commission investigating the record industry's practice of suing individual downloaders.
Professor Christine D. Ver Ploeg , one of the nation’s leading labor arbitrators, conceptualized and implemented an Advanced ADR course in which students design an alternative dispute resolution system for a real client. Clients have included: Best Buy; Education Minnesota (teachers' union); Education Minnesota and Minnesota Association of School Administrators; and Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals, Minnesota PTA, and Parents United.
Professor Nancy Ver Steeghis using breakthrough research on the nature of domestic violence to change the way courts handle domestic violence cases and enable “warring” schools of thought to fi nd common ground.
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For a degree in PRACTICAL WISDOM