Law Student of the Day: Minnesota 1L Dennis Jansen

In yesterday’s open thread on #17 though #28 schools in the U.S. News rankings, we neglected to include a riff on the crime statistics in various schools’ cities. We did start thinking about it today, though, as it seems that bullets occasionally fly in the City of Lakes, home to the #20-ranked law school. And Dennis Jansen, a University of Minnesota 1L, was unlucky enough to catch one in the back this weekend.

Jansen keeps a blog called No. 634 tracking his law school adventures. Usually the posts are about fairly mundane topics, like his new dog Harley (a mastiff) and classes (“CrimLaw is a waste of time“). But yesterday, he posted something rather out of the ordinary. One of his fellow students sent it along to us, saying, “So I read this blog by a kid in my 1L crim law class… and THIS was definitely the most interesting post: Jansen gets shot.”

According to the post, Jansen was out on the wild streets of Minneapolis Sunday after going to a club when…

I’m walking across Hennepin with what felt like the entire hiphop room of the Gay 90’s, when I hear popping sounds.

People scream and start running.

I feel something hit my back.

I stop on the curb and call over to T.

Me: “I think I got hit.”

T: “Shut up, where?”

(I lift up the back of my shirt and point.)

T: “OH MY GOD, they got you! They shot you!”

Me: “It’s a gunshot?”

T: “YES! THEY GOT YOU! (then to the street) HE GOT SHOT!”

His first thoughts were not of his mortality but of class the next morning:

So it’s around 2:30 am on a Monday morning and I’m sitting downtown bleeding on the side of the street. Random people coming from clubs stopped as they saw the blood coming from my back. I had a pretty good idea that I was going to miss this morning’s civil procedure class…

And you thought you were having a rough finals week.

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Jansen may give former honoree Alex Botsios (the Arizona 1L who wrestled his laptop away from an armed robber) a good running for ATL Law Student of all time. More after the jump, including a gratuitous, but not graphic, photo of the wound.


Jansen stayed at the hospital until Monday morning:

I just hoped that I would get out of the hospital in time to walk Harley and that this wouldn’t interfere with finals…

Throughout the night the doctor kept vacillating between taking the bullet out and leaving it inside of me. She finally decided to leave the bullet be, so yes I’m attending Crimlaw [Tuesday] with a bullet lodged in my back

Taking a bullet and showing up at CrimLaw is sincere dedication to law school. But finals are finals, after all.

The University of Minnesota is not a place for the weak.

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Jansen Gets Shot [no. 634]