March - April 2002

Posted April 15, 2002

Faculty and Alumni

“These are powerful institutions he’s up against,” says Prof. Bob Oliphant in an April 22 People magazine story about St. Paul attorney Jeffrey Anderson, ’75, who for nearly 20 years has represented alleged victims of molestation by Roman Catholic priests. Last month Anderson filed a RICO suit against a number of U.S. bishops. Later, in what People calls a “more audacious move,” he filed civil suits in federal court in Portland, Ore., and in a state court in Florida, identifying the Vatican as a defendant for alleged complicity in harboring clergy accused of sexual abuse. St. Paul attorney Andrew J. Eisenzimmer, ’77, who has represented the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, thinks Anderson launched his most recent attack mostly for the publicity and “knows there is virtually no chance the case is going to succeed,” People reports. Says Anderson: “It was something that had to be done.” Oliphant says Anderson has “withstood pressure, and that’s a credit to any lawyer.”

Faculty

Fourth-grader Rocky Sonkowski “was interfering with what everybody else was trying to do, and what happened to him didn’t interfere with what he was supposed to be getting in school,” Emeritus Prof. C. Paul Jones said of U.S. District Judge Ann Montgomery’s ruling that the New Prague student’s First Amendment rights weren’t violated when he wasn’t allowed to attend a school pizza party at the headquarters of the Minnesota Vikings football team. The boy, a fan of the Green Bay Packers, had planned to wear a Packers jersey to the party. Jones said he was “kind of proud of the youngster for standing up for what he believes in,” according to an April 12 story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by Howie Padilla.

Alumni

The facts surrounding Project Grayhawk and an Enron-affiliated partnership emerging as a centerpiece in the criminal investigation of Enron and its officers make the precise application of insider-trading laws murky, a circumstance prosecutors seem to recognize, says Christopher J. Bebel, ’85, of the Houston, Texas, law firm Shepherd, Smith & Bebel, reports Kurt Eichenwald in an April 15 story in the New York Times. Bebel, a former U.S. prosecutor and former attorney with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, says Enron “has the right to exclusive use of its proprietary information for proper corporate purposes,” but an executive using Enron information on behalf of a partnership “is not acting solely on behalf of the company, and is prohibited from using information that is confidentially conveyed to him in a corporate context.” Other media recently quoting Bebel in connection with Enron or its accountant, Arthur Andersen, include the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the New York Post, the BBC, Agence France Presse, Reuters, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

“You can easily spot editors this year by their stooped shoulders,” said Tim McGuire, ’87, editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and outgoing president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 10 at ASNE’s annual convention, in Washington, D.C. McGuire said the balance of power has shifted from editors as papers face “phenomenal profit pressure” from publishers and chief executive officers. According to an April 11 Star Tribune story by staff writer Rob Hotakainen, McGuire urged his colleagues to “show some courage” in promoting journalistic values and the profession’s public service duties. He also called for a national discussion on how to balance news values and profits.

Staff

Douglas Blanke, director of William Mitchell College of Law’s Tobacco Law Project, was interviewed by the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC) World Service radio April 11 about British American Tobacco’s loss in a case in an Australian court and the implications of the decision for litigation elsewhere in the world. Blanke is the author of Towards Health with Justice: Litigation and Public Inquiries as Tools for Tobacco Control, a report issued in Geneva, Switzerland, March 18 by the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization.

Posted March 19, 2002

Alumni

Jan Nielsen, ’83, represented a Lawrence Livermore Laboratory computer technician to whom an Alameda County, California, jury awarded $1 million, agreeing with the employee’s claim that she was fired for supporting a colleague’s sexual harassment claim. The worker, Dee Kotla, is pictured in the March 13 Contra Costa Valley Times with her attorneys, Nielsen and Gary Gwilliam. Laboratory officials hadn’t decided whether to appeal the jury’s split decision, writes Valley Times staff writer Andrea Widener.

Steve Pihlaja,’79, and Lorrie Stromme, ’81, are co-authors of “In the Shade of a Tree: Analyzing the Tree-Related Legal Problem,” cover article in the March 2002 issue of Bench & Bar, magazine of the Minnesota State Bar Association. Pihlaja is a Minneapolis solo practitioner, working in the areas of civil litigation and criminal defense. Stromme is an attorney, Hennepin County planner, and president of the Minnesota Shade Tree Committee.

Faculty and Staff

Emeritus Prof. Paul Marino, 65, died of cancer March 14, at his home in St. Paul. He “believed that his role as an attorney and law professor was to help those who otherwise would not receive full representation,” began a news obituary by staff writer Terry Collins in the March 17 Minneapolis Star Tribune. In a news obituary in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Jeremy Lane of Mid-Minnesota Legal Assistance said Marino “left his mark on all of the wonderful protections for tenants that we take for granted nowadays.” He described Marino as a lawyer who “always led with his heart.” Marino retired at the end of the 2000-2001 academic year, after teaching at William Mitchell for 27 years. He previously was executive director of the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis.

D. Douglas Blanke, director of the Tobacco Law Project at William Mitchell College of Law, is the author of Towards Health with Justice: Litigation and Public Inquiries as Tools for Tobacco Control, a report issued in Geneva, Switzerland, March 18 by the Tobacco Free Initiative of the World Health Organization. The report, issued as representatives of WHO’s 191 member states gathered in Geneva to begin a new round of talks on a global treaty to contain the growth in tobacco use around the world, urges governments and health groups to consider the use of lawsuits and public inquiries in support of tobacco-control efforts. The 71-page report is available in PDF format at www.who.int. The report and the opening of the treaty talks are described in March 18 reports in the New York Times, Reuters, Financial Times, and other print and Web-based publications.

“What we have created, essentially, is life imprisonment without a possibility of parole,” says Prof. Peter Erlinder in “Throwing Away the Key,” cover story by Paul Demko in the March 13 issue of Minneapolis-St. Paul CityPages (www.citypages.com)on Minnesota’s $20 million-a-year program to incarcerate and treat 179 former sex offenders. Also quoted in the story are Kathleen Rauenhorst ’78, Prof. Eric Janus, and Hennepin County District Court Judge Michael DeCourcey ’72.

“Why are these proposals being made now? There’s been no showing existing laws won’t work,” says Prof. Peter Erlinder in a March 6 Pulse of the Twin Cities (www.pulsetc.com) story by Lydia Howell about the Minnesota Patriot Act, anti-terrorism legislation authored in the state’s House by Rep. Rich Stanek (R-Maple Grove).

Posted March 4

Alumni

“As municipal waters hurled, he was the hometown boy elected to go aboard to keep the city’s ship upright and stable during rough political seas.” That’s the lead in Wanda Moeller’s Feb. 27 story in the Grand Rapids, Minn., Herald-Review, which named Grand Rapids native Jim Hoolihan, ’79, the paper’s 2002 Citizen of the Year. Hoolihan, a former mayor of the city, heads Industrial Lubricant Company and serves on the boards of the Blandin Foudation and the College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, and is a member of the Governor’s Task Force on Mining and Minerals. www.grandrapids-mn.com

Making the transition from practicing attorney to judge wasn’t difficult, “but during the first week when I would see people in hallways and they would say, ‘Hi, Judge,’ or ‘Hi, Your Honor,’ I would think they were being sarcastic,” said Ramsey County District Court Judge George Stephenson, ’85, in a question-and-answer interview with staff writer Michelle Lore in the Feb. 25 issue of Minnesota Lawyer. Asked if he brings “something extra” to the judicial role as an African American, Stephenson answered, “One of my filters is the experience of a black person who grew up in Chicago, which was and still is a very racially segregated town.... So I bring sensitivity to that that maybe someone who hasn’t had that experience wouldn’t bring.”

“Some judges when they get to the bench it’s like taking a throne. Judge Shinn was never that way,” said former Jackson County, Mo., prosecutor Claire McCaskill of Judge David W. Shinn, ’63. He helped younger lawyers grow by treating them with the same respect as an experienced lawyer, said McCaskill, in a Feb. 27 Kansas City Star story by staff writer Kevin Hoffman on Shinn in connection with his mandatory retirement at age 70. “Shinn has had his courtroom management skills tested,” writes Hoffmann. He had a woman die on the witness stand, a young attorney get lost and end up in an empty courtroom after a lunch break, and an after-verdict fracas in the hall that required help from a police tactical unit.

Faculty

Prof. Peter Erlinder was a guest on a WCCO Radio show Feb. 27, discussing the constitutionality of a federal statute that makes it illegal for preachers to support or oppose political candidates and a bill recently introduced in Congress that would repeal the act as an infringement on First Amendment rights. He was a guest on another WCCO Radio show Feb. 28, discussing an Internet defamation case he will argue before the Minnesota Supreme Court March 6. Erlinder, one of the attorneys for the Alabama plaintiff, argues that Minnesota’s Court of Appeals was correct in ruling that an Alabama woman has a right to file suit in that state against a Minnesota women she claimed had libeled her on an Internet bulletin board on Egyptology. In “Flame Wars & Free Speech,” a Feb. 25 St. Paul Pioneer Press story about the case by staff writer Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Erlinder says that if the Minnesota Supreme Court rules the Alabama court doesn’t have jurisdiction, people wronged on the Internet would face the burden of having to travel far and wide to defend their reputations. The Minnesota resident “shouldn’t be surprised she was hauled into court in Alabama,” he says.

Prof. Dan Kleinberger commented in a WCCO-TV news story March 2 on a legal dispute between Simon Property Group, owner of the Mall of America, and GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., the mall’s mortgage holder. GMAC is trying to force the mall to purchase terrorism insurance. Simon, which has obtained a temporary restraining order against GMAC, says the cost of the insurance is prohibitive and would be an unreasonable burden on the mall’s tenants.