Minnesota Litigator
News & Commentary
Do not consider the blog to be a substitute for obtaining legal advice from a qualified attorney licensed in your state.
CREW v. Trump: U of M Law Professor Richard Painter Joins the Fray against Trump
Minnesota Litigator generally avoids covering stories that other larger news outlets are covering because we do not have the resources to cover such stories like the bigger players. Our “coverage,” therefore, is too often simply echoing what others have written. University of Minnesota law Prof. Painter’s lawsuit against Pres. Trump is such a story. Since […]
An Important Message from Minnesota Immigration Lawyer, Mikael Merissa
The following is a guest-post by Mikael Merissa: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” – Maya Angelou Consistent with his campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the United States until we “can figure out what’s going on,” President Trump issued an executive order on Friday temporarily banning refugees […]
Balking at Fulfilling Contract Killings…
Making products to kill human beings involves some complicated issues. First, humans can be clever and hard to kill. Second, as a general rule, we humans are not supposed to kill one another. The first challenge is a technical challenge. The second challenge is a legal, moral, and political challenge. The recently filed complaint of […]
Shortening the Terrible Slog from Winning a Money Judgment to Collecting the Money
Many of us think that when litigants win an award of money in court, they actually get the money. All of the money. Most understand that the government does not just cut a check to a winning plaintiff against a losing defendant and then chase the defendant for reimbursement (though that’s an interesting idea and […]
Are Fetid By-Products Inherent in a Free Market Economy?
There are almost no advocates in our country or, for that matter, in any industrialized country on earth today, that do not recognize (1) the great strengths of free market capitalism, on the one hand, and (2) the impossibility of unregulated free market capitalism on the other hand. Regulation is a given. The ubiquitous and […]
A Remembrance and a Reminder
David Schlesinger, an employee rights lawyer for the Minneapolis employment powerhouse law firm of Nichols Kaster published a remembrance of his lawyer father this week in MinnPost. Attention Minnesota Civil Litigators (and those who love them): If you have not read it, go read it. The punishing expense of civil litigation, the inherent arbitrariness and […]
The Best Evidence Rule: Just Don’t. Don’t even bother.
If you find yourself thinking about objecting to the admission of evidence at trial because it is not “the best evidence,” close your eyes, take three slow long “cleansing” breaths (in for count to 4, hold for 2, out on a count of 6), and think again. If you find yourself appealing a bad result […]
R.I.P. Attorney Larry Leventhal, Activist and Progressive for Native Americans and Others
I never met or knew Larry Leventhal and I am pretty sure we are unrelated. But for my twenty years of practice in civil litigation in Minnesota, I have gotten telephone calls intended for Larry. Once, a judge told me, “You look like your father,” thinking I was Larry Leventhal’s son. A few times, over the […]
Enough Already: A Subversion of Civil Litigation
There are few clichés more common in our civil litigation system than the reviled “trial by ambush.” Basic requirements of our legal system are orderliness and predictability and there are not supposed to be “surprises” at trial. Analogize to a boxing match (or any adversarial “dispute resolution” forum). You have got to have rules — when the […]
U.S. Charges KleinBank With Red-Lining
On the Friday before the Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday, the U.S. government filed its complaint against KleinBank charging the bank with “red-lining” in the U.S. District Court (D. Minn.). Historically, “red-lining” was a practice by which lenders would avoid offering credit to majority-minority neighborhoods. In our economy, cutting off access to credit, whether both […]