Jason Marisam
Jason Marisam will join the Mitchell Hamline faculty this summer as an associate professor of law, one of several new tenure/tenure-track faculty hires at the school. He has been an assistant attorney general in the solicitor general’s division of the Minnesota attorney general’s office since 2016, where he represents and defends the state of Minnesota and its agencies in constitutional, administrative, employment, and tort law cases.
Marisam says the most meaningful work in his career was during the 2020 election, when he represented Minnesota’s secretary of state in several court cases over how the election was administered during the pandemic. “Through this litigation, we were able to put in place measures to help ensure people could vote safely during 2020,” he said. “For me, protecting Minnesotans’ right to safely vote was exciting and important work.”
The issues ranged from whether to require witness signatures on absentee ballots to whether those ballots would count if they were postmarked by Election Day, as opposed to needing to be fully received by Election Day. Marisam and his team at the attorney general’s office won important victories for voting protections. He says he hopes to further research and focus on voting rights and election law in the future, in addition to the work he’s already done in administrative law.
Marisam, 43, grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and didn’t attend law school until five years after graduating from Princeton. He attended Harvard Law, where he was an editor of the law review. “I loved the way law school opened your mind to thinking about the world in a new way,” he said.
One article Marisam wrote while at Harvard was about how the 1918 election was administered during the flu pandemic of the time. “When an election is held during an emergency,” reads one passage in the article, “how can election administration officials and political actors adapt to changing circumstances while also maintaining the integrity of the election?” It was a question Marisam would find himself litigating in court 10 years later, during a pandemic he could have never imagined at that time.
After working as an associate at a firm in Boston after law school, then a two-year fellowship, Marisam moved to Minnesota, where his wife grew up. He was hired to teach at Hamline University School of Law in 2011 and taught for three years before departing the school just before the combination that created Mitchell Hamline. He then clerked for U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen in Minnesota before joining the attorney general’s office.
“I always aimed to return to teaching and academia when the right opportunity came along,” said Marisam. “I love teaching law students and am excited about training a new generation of lawyers at Michell Hamline.”
Marisam has published in the peer-reviewed Election Law Journal and in numerous other law journals, including the Fordham Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Administrative Law Review, Arizona State Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review. He was selected as an Attorney of the Year by Minnesota Lawyer in 2020 and 2021.
Marisam also was a competitive, NCAA All-American fencer and still enjoys the sport when he can find free time amidst raising three children.
Mitchell Hamline faculty
The latest from Faculty in the News
MPR News December 16, 2024
Professor of Law
Minnesota Lawyer December 17, 2024
Professor of Law
WCCO's The Morning News November 11, 2024
Professor of Law
The latest faculty publications
Book November 19, 2024
Professor of Law
Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 2024 Nov 13:S0885-3924(24)01116-3 November 13, 2024
Professor of Law
Minnesota Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers Blog (October 29, 2024) October 29, 2024
Associate Professor of Law
The latest faculty headlines
Professor Pottratz Acosta weighs in on immigration issues in wake of election
Professor Ana Pottratz Acosta After November’s presidential election, many are speculating about what the immigration system will look like under a second Trump administration, and what that means for Minnesota. Professor Ana Pottratz Acosta has been q …
November 22, 2024
Kaori Kenmotsu brings embodied approach to teaching DRI courses
Returning to her alma mater as an assistant professor of law, Kaori Kenmotsu ’22 brings to Mitchell Hamline a breadth of experience in the worlds of dance, theater, yoga, public policy, community organizing, teaching, and now law. For Kenmotsu, however …
September 30, 2024
Peter Larsen seeks to inspire students to use the law to help others
Peter Larsen remembers the very day he became interested in pursuing law. It was his junior year of high school, and the Minnesota Supreme Court was hearing a case at his school about a drunk driver who hit a family of four after leaving a local Americ …
September 20, 2024
