MinnLawyer Blog

Jerry Lane

Mid-Minnesota Legal Assistance (MMLA) has announced that Jerry Lane will be leaving his role as Executive Director in 2011.  MMLA is an urban-rural Legal Aid program serving 20 counties in central Minnesota, including Minneapolis.  Lane has been with Legal Aid for 41 years, serving as executive director of MMLA for the past 30.

MMLA will consider both internal and external candidates to fill the executive director position. Lane will continue in his role until his successor has been selected and then will assist with the transition.

“Legal Aid makes a difference in the lives of thousands of Minnesotans every year and will continue to serve our community’s most vulnerable.” Lane said in a press release announcing his retirement. “I have been privileged to serve our clients throughout my career. Time and again they have set an example for me of dignity, courage and generosity in the face of adversity the likes of which I have never had to endure. I look forward to the next chapter in our history. I remain committed to our staff, our supporters and our partners. I hope to help build our resources so we can be there for our clients when they need us in the future.”

“No one has been a stronger advocate for the rights of underprivileged individuals, children, seniors and persons with disabilities,” said Mary Knoblauch, chair of the Fund for the Legal Aid Society.  “Jerry’s name is synonymous with justice and he has made an indelible impact on the quality of life for citizens of our state.”

A big day for judicial candidate Greg Wersal

A split three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this morning issued an opinion sweeping away a couple of the state’s remaining restrictions on judicial campaigns.

The federal appellate court struck down rules barring judicial candidates from endorsing candidates for political offices and from personally soliciting contributions from small groups and individuals.

“[W]e think the Constitution favors strict recusal standards and fewer speech restrictions,” wrote Clarence Arlen Beam for the two-judge majority.

In his dissent, Judge Kermit E. Bye, said, “[W]here a state has crafted its restrictions carefully to maintain a fair and impartial judiciary, in both practice and appearance, as Minnesota has done here, the First Amendment must yield.”

The 54-page decision is Wersal v. Sexton, et al.

The ruling is a huge victory for attorney Greg Wersal, currently running for a seat on the Minnesota Supreme Court against Justice Helen Meyer. Wersal has been on a more than a decade-long quest to end the restrictions Minnesota has placed on judicial campaigns that has taken him on several tips to the 8th Circuit and all the way to U.S. Supreme Court. His challenges have eviscerated the framework for the vast majority of the restrictions.

In a release sent shortly after the ruling was announced, Wersal trumpeted, “This is a major victory toward the goal of holding judges accountable through free, open and competitive elections. I now hope to raise the money necessary to tell the people of Minnesota that the judges, including my opponent in this race, want a constitutional amendment that would strip the public of their right to vote for judges. I will do everything I can to protect the right to vote.”

Proponents of the restrictions had argued that they were necessary to preserve the appearance of an unbiased and unbeholden judiciary.

We will post a fuller story on our main site later today.

I suppose this should surprise no one. Shirley Sherrod, the former U.S. Agriculture employee who was forced to resign her post earlier this month when she was labeled a racist after a video of a speech she gave hit the blogosphere, is suing the blogger who posted the video on his site.

Soon after the video went viral it became apparent that Andrew Breitbart had posted a video edited to make Sherrod look, well, worse. But it was too late. Sherrod’s boss Ag. Secretary Tom Vilsack had already asked for her resignation. According to a few reports Sherrod was in the car when someone contacted her and told her to pull over and e-mail the resignation from her Blackberry. Ouch!

My question is this. What can Sherrod sue here for? Libel? Slander? Defamation of character? Being an (expletive deleted). I honestly don’t know. It’s been a while since my J-Law class but here’s what I remember a plaintiff must do to prove libel/slander:

• First, the plaintiff must show that the defendant communicated a defamatory statement.
• Second, the plaintiff must show that the statement was published or communicated to at least one other person besides the plaintiff.
• Third, the plaintiff must show that the communication was about the plaintiff and that another party receiving the communication could identify the plaintiff as the subject of the defamatory message.
• Fourth, the plaintiff must show that the communication injured the plaintiff’s reputation.

Did Breitbart ever say he hadn’t edited the video to make her look bad? I can’t remember, but I don’t think so.

I called Jane Kirtley, the Director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. Her advice? Sue for false light and invasion of privacy.

“False light/invasion of privacy is like libel, but it doesn’t have to be harmful to your reputation,” she said. “What [Sherrod ] would argue that because of the truncated nature of the video, it depicted her in a way that was inaccurate.”

One example is a magazine used a photo of some men sitting down on their lunch break that ran with a story about unemployment. The men successfully sued because they were in fact employed. The problem is not every state recognizes false light laws. Minnesota for example does not.

The July 2010 administration of the Minnesota bar examination is now history and 800 or so would-be lawyers are no doubt kicking back and relaxing for the first time in weeks. No more late night study sessions, no more delving into the wonders of fee entails, res judicata and collateral estoppel. Let the wine corks fly, the music start — and let sweet, sweet sleep return.

Minnesota Lawyer reporter Patrick Thornton and videographer Bill Klotz were at the RiverCenter yesterday as the recent law grads were filing in for the first day of the exam. The exam takers were understandably a little nervous, but other than that seemed to be doing pretty well. Check out the video below:

This story was one of the most popular stories online when I left last night and it still was when I got in this morning.

A woman in Oklahoma really doesn’t want her dad to be judge. So much so that she stared a Web site with perhaps the best URL in some time: www.dontvoteformydad.com.

John Mantooth (great last name) is running for judge in McClain County, Okla.  His daughter from his first marriage Jan Schill and her husband Andrew started the Web site and took out an ad in the local paper urging voters to vote for anyone else. The story gets even odder because Andrew used to be law partners with Mantooth’s opponent in the judicial race. If you visit the site, you see that one of Andrew’s gripes against his quasi-father-in-law is a Christmas present from a few years back.

I can’t quite think of a story from Minnesota that is on par with this one. Though there is a guy running for judge in Ramsey County with my last name. I’ve asked the matriarch of the family and we’re not related. This could potentially be a good thing for Matthew Thornton.

The lobby of the River Center in St. Paul was packed 50 minutes before the tests were distributed. Some of the students set to take the bar exam this morning nervously scanned a few note cards trying to commit that last bit of knowledge to memory, others chatted with friends and a few stood silently in the corners staring off into the middle distance clutching a lap top.

A photographer and I interviewed a few of the nervous test takers for a video we are putting together that should be on the site soon. I asked them how they prepared and if any of the sections had them more worried than others. One man said he went and saw “Inception” last night and was in bed by 9. For those of you who have seen the movie, I wonder if he dreamed more about a shoot out at snow fortress than wills and contracts.

Some of the test takers have jobs lined up, but just as many, if not more, didn’t. But that didn’t seem to matter. They had come to the point when you just can’t study anymore, either you know the information or you don’t. And for that, they had a reason to be relieved.

The test takers have another reason to be positive, if the recent trend holds true, about nine out of 10 will pass the bar. If it were me, I’d like those odds.

I was reading (via MinnPost) an excellent Christian Science Monitor story — “Are iPads, smart phones and the mobile web rewiring the way we think?” — when I started to think of the potential implications for the 800 or so law students signed up to take the bar exam tomorrow at St. Paul’s RiverCenter.

The gist of the article is that new technologies have both made us smarter (by exposing us to and teaching us to navigate a wealth of information) and made us dumber (by reducing our capacity for deep thought through narrowing our attention spans.)

The bar exam is, of course, something where it would be helpful to have the capacity for deep thought. OK, OK, maybe you don’t need it for the multistate portion, but for the essay exams at least.

I called Margaret Corneille, executive director of the Board of Law Examiners, to see if there had been any changes in the technologies students can use since the antediluvian days when I took the exam. (As I recall, we just chiseled an A, B or C onto a stone tablet then.)

As it turns out, there’s only one major change - about 85 percent of test takers type out their answers on a computer rather than the old-fashioned furious scribbling into a blue book. However, no other computer assistance is available.

Thus, would-be lawyers from Generation Y have to leave behind their smart phones, iPads, iPods and other portable electronic devices. The Christian Science Monitor story tells the tale of one youngster who, stripped of his electronic gadgets for a week, wound up getting lost in his own neighborhood. Hopefully that won’t happen to any bar exam takers tomorrow. On the other hand, maybe somebody that clueless ought not to be a lawyer anyway.

Corneille told me that exam takers are only allowed in a pencil (on multistate day), a pen (on essay day) and “Kleenex.” The Kleenex, I suppose, serves the dual functions of letting you clear out your nose and giving you something to cry into if things don’t go your way.

But the current generation of lawyers need not worry. Despite their allegedly short attention spans, there is no evidence the bar passage rate is going down. Minnesota’s pass rate - which hovers at about 90 percent - remains one the highest in the country.

So what does all this electronic gadgetry mean for meaningful thought and discourse in the long run? I’d tell you, but my cell is ringing right now and I have a couple of e-mails to finish …

“America thrives on competition; Barbie, the all-American girl, will too.” With those words – determining who the all-American girl is as a matter of law? — the 9th Circuit has set the Bratz dolls free, at least for now. The court dismissed an equitable trust on the Bratz doll line that Mattel had achieved and suggested that the matter be retried. Mattel thus lost a $100 million verdict as well as ownership of the brand, suggesting a dim future for the tiny-waisted, long-legged all American girl. TYVM, says Mattel.

The court, in an opinion written by Judge Alex Kosinski, appeared really into the dolls. “Unlike the relatively demure Barbie, the urban, multiethnic and trendy Bratz dolls have attitude. This spunk struck a chord, and Bratz became an overnight success,” the court, like, gushed. OMG.

They also appeared to have paid totally close attention to the girls. “One doll might have brown eyes with bronze eyeshadow, wavy auburn hair, leather boots, a blue plaid mini matched with a black button-down, silver knot earrings and a barrel bag. Another might have green eyes with pink eyeshadow, brown hair in a messy bun, gold wedges, dark skinny jeans matched with a purple halter, a turquoise cuff and a clutch, along with a slightly different body and facial structure.” Who knew the court was so hip, but this is California, after all.

Next month Minnesota CLE will hold its annual much-liked and well-attended Duluth conference for small-firm and solo practitioners.

The full name of the program — to be held Monday Aug. 2 and Tuesday Aug. 3 — is the “Strategic Solutions for Solo and Small Firms Conference.” This year’s program includes a few big names: Carolyn Elefant, a well-known blogger and lecturer on solo and small-firm issues; Barron Henley on technology; and social networking and legal writing guru Lisa Solomon. Also, back by popular demand, will Matthew Homann, who delivered a much-talked about keynote last year. There is also a preconference event for those of you who want to arrive a day early and enjoy a day more of good times by Lake Superior.

Minnesota CLE’s Peter Berge told me that signups are ahead of last year, with more than 400 expected to attend the conference.

We can vouch for the fact that folks enjoyed themselves last year. When we spoke with a random selection of attendees at the 2009 conference, we got nothing but positive feedback. See for yourself by watching this video, taken by Minnesota Lawyer associate editor Michelle Lore and videographer Bill Klotz.

A family that says it was defamed by a neighbor who made an allegedly false report of child abuse may proceed with a lawsuit because there is a fact question about whether the neighbor made the report in good faith, a unanimous Supreme Court has ruled.The decision reverses the Ramsey County District Court and the Court of Appeals, which said that the defendant was entitled to statutory immunity for reports of suspected child abuse made in good faith.

The Supreme Court said that the neighbor did not report to authorities until after she was contacted by an attorney for the plaintiffs, who believed that the neighbor had told others that the daughter in the family was being abused by the son. It also said that she was not entitled to immunity for communications not made as a part of an official report.

The case is J. E. B. et al. v. Danks. See the upcoming edition of Minnesota Lawyer for complete coverage.