A YEAR OF GREAT
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
MICHAEL S. MCGINNISS
Dean, University of North Dakota
School of Law
As I write, it has been one year since I was
honored to begin my service as the Dean
of the UND School of Law. It has been a
year of great challenges, but also one full of
accomplishments by our faculty, staff, and
students, and one full of great progress and
promise for the future. I am truly grateful
for all the support and encouragement
over the past year from SBAND President
Aubrey Fiebelkorn-Zuger, who has provided
stellar leadership and exemplary service for
the North Dakota Bar in that role. I am
honored my first year as a member of the
SBAND Board of Governors coincided
with her term as president, and I greatly
look forward to our continued collaborations
in support of excellence in legal education
and the profession in the years ahead. I am
also excited to work in partnership with our
new SBAND President Carrie Francis as we
develop and execute strategies to make the
North Dakota legal profession and its law
school stronger together.
Among the many highlights of the past
year were the successful hiring of three new
tenure-track faculty members for 2020-
2021: Jennifer Cook, Nick Datzov, and
Michelle Phillips. Their legal expertise and
promise of teaching excellence will further
strengthen our curriculum in a variety
of important ways. I would like to take a
moment to introduce them to you.
22 THE GAVEL
Professor Cook has been with us for two
years as a full-time special appointment
faculty member, and we are very excited she
will be on the tenure-track beginning this
year. She joined us after serving as policy
director for the ACLU of North Dakota.
Before that, she served as a judicial law clerk
to Magistrate Judge Karen Klein of the U.S.
District Court for North Dakota. She is a
proud 2010 graduate of the UND School of
Law. In the coming year, she will continue to
teach our first-year students legal research,
analyses, writing, and oral advocacy in our
Lawyering Skills program, as well as teach
new courses on Privacy Law and a Social
Justice Lawyering writing course for our
upper-level students.
Nick Datzov comes to us from his law
practice with Fredrikson & Byron, where
he has focused on intellectual property
law. He previously served as a judicial law
clerk for Judge Kermit Bye of the Eighth
Circuit and graduated summa cum laude
from law school at Hamline in 2011. In the
coming year, he will be teaching our firstyear
Torts course, along with Intellectual
Property, Remedies, and, as my former
students among you will know is a subject of
particular interest to me, our bar course on
Conflict of Laws.
Michelle Phillips joins us from a
professional career with Hess Corporation,
where she has most recently served as a
commercial advisor in Minot and, in the
past year, in Houston. She will be teaching
courses in the upcoming year on Oil & Gas
Law, Energy & Mining Law, Transactional
Negotiations, and Business Associations.
She earned her juris doctor and MBA from
the University of Oklahoma in 2006. She
has 14 years of energy industry experience,
and her work has supported exploration,
production, and onshore and offshore
midstream operations. Her experience has
focused on examination of land, mineral,
and leasehold title; reviewing title opinions;
stakeholder engagement; upstream and
midstream project management; as well
as interpreting, drafting, and negotiating
contractual provisions in oil-and gas-related
contracts. She holds bar licenses in seven
states, including North Dakota.
We are very pleased that, with the strong
support we received from the North Dakota
Legislature in the 2019 session, we were
able to pursue these outstanding hiring
opportunities and successfully complete
them. We are also grateful we have been
able to bring back to the School of Law,
in the past year, adjunct faculty members
who have long contributed so much to our
legal education program, such as Bruce
Quick and Mark Friese. We have also added
new adjunct faculty, such as former North
Dakota District Judge Debbie Kleven to
teach Agricultural Law and UND Law
graduate Rachel Prudhomme to teach
Alternative Dispute Resolution. Each of
these excellent lawyers will be teaching for
us again in the next academic year, as will
Professors Jenny Samarzja and Paul Traynor,
highly valued members of our full-time
special appointment faculty whose extensive
practice backgrounds and dedication to
teaching enhance our students’ education in
tremendously important ways.
We are also excited to report for the coming
academic year, we have developed plans to
offer students new experiential learning
opportunities through clinical practicum
courses in the area of family law. Professor
Ariana Meyers, a member of our full-time
faculty, will be leading the way in developing
this pilot program and course sequence for
our students. Through a clinical practicum,
with close faculty supervision, our students
can gain experience representing clients, and,
through reflection and classroom discussions
about their cases, develop enhanced abilities
to exercise sound professional judgment as
future lawyers.
Moreover, our highly talented and
hardworking UND School of Law students