OF NOTE

Kimberly Slay

Maslon, Minneapolis, announced the addition of Partner Kimberly Slay to the firm’s Litigation Group. Slay previously served as general counsel for former Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and former Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, as assistant commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Revenue, and as assistant secretary for the Office of Legal Affairs for the Louisiana Department of Revenue.

ARCHITECTURE/ENGINEERING

Golden Valley-based engineering and consulting firm WSB announced the promotions of Chris Kester to director of project controls and Mark Watson to director of materials engineering.

EDUCATION

The Dakota County Regional Chamber Charitable Foundation announced it has awarded a “FourWins” scholarship to Payton Powell, who is working toward his AA degree in law enforcement, with an emphasis on culturally responsive peace officer training, at Inver Hills Community College.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Growth Operators, a Minneapolis-based business growth consultant, announced the following executive changes: Molly Hiller promoted to president; Ron Hornbaker joins the company in the newly created role of chief revenue officer, and Stephanie Laitala-Rupp added as chief operating officer. Hiller most recently served as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. … Bremer Bank, St. Paul, announced the promotion of Colette Campbell to chief people and culture officer. She succeeds Meghan Brown, who is taking on the newly created executive role of chief administrative officer.

HONORS

Anuj Kakkad, 17, of Plymouth, has been named a 2024 Prudential Emerging Visionary for Minnesota, one of 25 nationwide, and will receive a $5,000 award. Kakkad co-founded “Vigilance Safety,” a student-led nonprofit developing technical solutions to improve school safety and reduce casualties from school shootings. Prudential Emerging Visionaries is sponsored by Prudential Financial in collaboration with Ashoka, an organization in the social impact sector, with advisory support provided by the Financial Health Network.

LAW

Moss & Barnett, Minneapolis, announced that attorney Austin J. Malinowski has joined the firm’s litigation department and that Lynn M. Mattson has joined the firm as executive director. … Fredrikson, Minneapolis, announced that shareholders Cynthia A. Moyer, Laura L. Myers, Courtney A. H. Thompson, John Pickerill and Ann Dunn Wessberg have been named in the 2024 edition of the World Trademark Review 1000: The World’s Leading Trademark Professionals. … National law firm Saul Ewing announced that partner Maxwell Bremer has been named managing partner of the firm’s Minneapolis office. Bremer help open the office five years ago and will succeed Al Coleman. He is a graduate of William Mitchell College of Law, now Mitchell Hamline, in St. Paul.

NONPROFITS

Catholic Charities Twin Cities, Minneapolis, announced that Bob Elfstrand has been named senior vice president of advancement. Elfstrand  has led development efforts at The Redemption Project MN, the YMCA of the North and Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Minneapolis in addition to numerous other volunteer and fund-raising efforts in the Twin Cities.

REAL ESTATE

National commercial real estate firm CBRE announced that Blake Hastings has rejoined the firm’s Minneapolis office as executive vice president. Hastings served as managing director for CBRE Minneapolis from 2013-18, and most recently was president of national property development firm Oppidan, Excelsior.

RETAIL

Let Them Stim announced the launch of an online store offering therapeutic sensory products catering to neurodivergent adults. The company is based in St. Paul and the CEO-founder is Toni Royaal.

SPONSORSHIPS

St. Paul-based Summit Brewing Co. and the Minnesota Twins announced a renewed multiyear partnership that will see Summit continue to be a Twins “Official Craft Beer” and “Official Hometown Craft Beer.”

UTILITES

Xcel Energy, Minneapolis, announced it has named Rob Clark senior vice president and chief communications officer, a newly created role. Clark most recently was a managing director for FSG Global. … The Southern Minnesota Municipal Power Agency, Rochester, announced the hire of Jeremy Sutton as director of operations and chief operating officer, succeeding Mark Mitchell who is retiring. Sutton most recently was director of power resources and chief energy supply officer at Rochester Public Utilities.

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Pity the poor dog owners! As warm weather descends, communities from California to Arizona to Michigan have announced stricter enforcement of leash laws.

I don’t have a dog in this particular fight, but I do have an interest in bits of social history that tend to be overlooked. And a glance at the history of leash laws tells us why they’re likely to stick around: Because someone always comes up with a new reason why they’re important.

Leashes have been known since ancient times, but requiring them is a more recent development. A leash was traditionally a sign distinguishing wild from domesticated dogs. George Vest’s 1870 “Eulogy of the Dog” — often cited, inaccurately, as the origin of the cliché that dog is man’s best friend — was actually delivered in court, where Vest was arguing on behalf of a farmer whose unleashed hunter, Old Drum, had been shot dead by a neighbor who feared the animal was a stray about to prey on his livestock. (Attacks on livestock by stray dogs still happen.)

Leash laws became common in the U.S. not to protect animals but to protect people. An 1891 article in The Lancet urged that unleashed dogs be captured and, if not claimed, killed to reduce the spread of rabies, which at the time was rampant. A 1903 report from Colorado Agricultural College noted despairingly that the disease had been “positively proven” in about half the states “and probably exists in all.”

Reformers demanded mandates, but while town councils dithered, judges found ways to encourage leashes. In 1904, for instance, a New York court ruled that taking an unleashed dog home and treating it as your own was not larceny; the fault rested upon the owner, who should not have let Fido roam. And even in the absence of formal requirements, the courts routinely took the side of people injured by dogs running free of their owners.

Though I’ve found no data on the precise prevalence of leash laws, it’s clear that during the first third of the 20th century, the rabies panic caused them to spread rapidly. As fear of the disease faded, many of communities began to consider repeal. But government decrees take on lives of their own, and supporters began developing new arguments to keep the mandates on the books.

Letters to the editor warned of canine threats to backyard gardens and other household pets. The July 1946 issue of Safety Bulletin (a federal newsletter) defended leash laws on the ground that they protected “over 100,000 mail men daily subjected to this hazard” — the hazard in question being bites. A classic 1956 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle argued that leashes were necessary to shield the dogs themselves against “stupid” owners who let them run free to be struck by cars.

That era being more like ours than we care to remember, there were also challenges to the constitutionality of the leash laws. (They failed.)

In recent decades, support has come from environmentalists, who argue that unleashed dogs disrupt the habitats of wildlife, introduce canine-spread diseases, and kill other animals — particularly their young. Is this argument correct? There’s some evidence that leash laws make little difference in the degree of biodiversity, but most studies find quite the opposite.

Perhaps the difficulty in pinning down a clearer answer is because the laws are widely ignored. A 2017 study of a lakeside recreation area found a compliance rate of just 16%. A 2019 study of a regulated beach (in Australia) concluded from the area dogs covered and the speeds at which they moved that few were under the control of their owners.

Support for leash laws may depend on just whose territory is being fouled. A 2023 study of an Oregon recreation area found that visitors who lived nearby were much more supportive of leash laws than visitors from farther away.

And a lot of people just don’t like dogs. Judge Richard Posner, in a famous example of how easy it is to tell a lie, imagines a chance encounter with an acquaintance whom he then compliments on his new dog, even though it’s “a little yappy thing” that he secretly finds “hideous.” Many a dog owner, on the other hand, prefers what an anti-leash Canadian legislator back in 1916 called “the privilege of taking a stroll and have his dog with him if he likes without any other formality.”

As for the annual spring crackdown, it’s generally a bad idea to have laws that are all bark and no bite. But whether you love leash laws or hate them, I wonder whether we’re fighting over the environment or the dogs themselves. Depending on the answer, one might just say that the contretemps is a case of the tail wagging the … well, you know.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

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Edward Lotterman

We as a country are more politically divided now than at any time since the Civil War. More so, I’d say, even than the turbulent Vietnam Era 1960s.

Because even then the foundations of our system were still generally accepted.

We are now eight months from a presidential election with two unpopular candidates, one of whom — along with many of his followers — openly question Constitutional norms and the objective rule of law.

And the platforms of both campaigns face monetary policy issues. Which leads us to discuss the influence and fate of the Federal Reserve.

Democrat Joe Biden is blamed for ongoing inflation in his first term but does not want a recession to combat inflation before or after the election. This delicate balance has been deftly handled by the Fed, at least so far.

Republican Donald Trump proposes to use executive power to impose 10% tariffs on all imports into our country — except for those from China that would face a 60% rate. If actually implemented, these tariffs would be the largest tax increase both in absolute and relative terms in the history of our country.

Taken alone, such tariffs would force the general price level higher — a fact conveniently ignored by Republicans who pin inflation on Biden’s policies.

Our central bank, the Federal Reserve, could moderate such price rises, but whether and how it does so might depend on the degree it is controlled by either the president or Congress. For now, this appears to be a moot point. The reality is that, to the extent its leaders are willing to stand to their guns, no one at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue can tell the Fed what to do. That is no guarantee of stable prices or stable output, but it does mean that, excluding the power to appoint, no politician can make key monetary decisions.

The U.S. central bank has a uniquely odd governance system that sprang from a series of events and political compromises that go back to when George Washington was president. The Fed is partly government, though not exactly a government institution, yet it also is not entirely private. The president does appoint members of a key seven-member Board of Governors. These must be confirmed by the Senate like Cabinet members or federal judges. They are subject to the same salary limits as Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress and Supreme Court justices. They serve 14-year terms that start in January of even numbered years.

But these governors do not have power to make monetary policy on their own. Moreover, politicians have no statutory power to fire the chair of the Board of Governors, currently Jerome Powell — and there actually is a historical case in which a Fed chair refused to step down at the direction of a president.

So whatever plans Trump aide Stephen Miller, who got into government as an aide to former Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachman, or others have in planning a drastic Trump II Inauguration-afternoon restructuring the federal government decide, the Fed would be a hard nut to crack.

The 1913 Federal Reserve Act, with significant amendments in 1935, establishes the current governance.

So either Biden or Trump, elected in 2024 but inaugurated in January 2025, will not have even one appointee voting until January 2026. They will not get a second until January 2028, 10 months before the following presidential election. Since neither could serve a third term, that would end their influence on the board.

But couldn’t Trump simply fire the whole board the afternoon of his inauguration, or thereafter, and name their replacements? Such an act certainly would create a Constitutional crisis. President Ronald Reagan could fire all striking air traffic controllers despite their civil service status, because a statutory clause forbade their going on strike. But there is nothing in any statute that gives the president the power to remove Fed board members. Certainly, if Trump or Biden called for Powell or any other board member to step down, as Trump hinted during his term, they would be under tremendous pressure. But if they refused to do so, the president has no legal recourse.

Of course, couldn’t one simply send U.S. Marshals to physically remove the defiant governor from the premises and usher in a replacement, as U.S. agents walked Black students into Little Rock High School and Old Miss decades ago in defiance of states’ segregation laws? But that defiance of a structure created very deliberately 90 years ago would throw financial markets into a tizzy worldwide.

And even if the chair or other governors stepped down in the face of pressure from the Oval Office, the White House still would not be able to dictate interest rates or the money supply — even by proxy through loyal replacements.

That’s because these decisions are made by a Federal Open Market Committee that includes the presidents of five of the 12 district Federal Reserve banks serving in a rotation. These bank presidents are not government employees or appointees in any way. They are hired by the private corporations that these 12 banks legally are. They are chosen by boards of directors of these private businesses and usually are the conservative element on policy decisions.

If a U.S. president had convinced all of these governors to step down and had replaced them with flunkies, there would be a 7-5 majority that might do the president’s bidding. Again, such a revolutionary and reckless act to give a president control of monetary policy would throw global financial markets into turmoil.

And yes, if a president has filibuster-proof majorities in both houses of Congress, they could rescind the Federal Reserve Act entirely and create a new central bank to their liking, even one run out of a cubby hole in the West Wing. Even these most radical actions might happen at some very low level of probability.

Yet people should rest with some assurance.

When President Richard Nixon took office in January 1969, he called Fed Chair Willian McChesney Martin into the Oval Office and told him to resign because Nixon was naming Arthur Burns as a replacement. Martin responded that he had another year in his term as chair and was not going to resign. Burns did not take over until a year later and that is where our era of great inflation began. Nixon was angered, but knew it would roil financial markets and rile key Wall Street campaign donors if he started a public fight to fire a Fed chair. Whether Trump has such trust or awe of such institutional norms is an open question.

Powell — appointed chair by Trump, by the way — has a four-year term as chair that runs into 2026. He well might follow Martin in declining any order to resign that post.

Powell’s term as a member of the board runs into 2028. Because of resignations, five of the seven current governors are Biden nominees. One of the others, Christopher Waller, a Bemidji State grad who came out of the St. Louis Fed, is not likely to be a Trump lackey.

So a new president could seize control of monetary policy by a series of unprecedented extra-statutory acts or by having a rubber stamping Congress. Anything could happen. But citizens, voters and Wall Street do not want financial chaos that becomes economic chaos. Expect even the most reckless president to shy away from overthrowing the Fed.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.