Menominee mayor returns to school

MENOMINEE — Mayor Casey Hoffman will return as a substitute teacher at the Menominee Area Public Schools for the 2024-25 school year.

He also began classes — as a student — this week. Hoffman is one of a handful of lawyers nationwide awarded scholarships to study at the internationally ranked Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law in Malibu, California where he is anticipated to graduate with a Masters of Laws degree. Hoffman will attend classes online and part-time from Menominee.

“The best leaders never stop learning,” Hoffman said. “As mayor I have a duty to pursue continuing education in the same way a doctor or engineer does, and it is a distinct privilege to train with the world’s foremost negotiators, mediators and arbitrators at Pepperdine.”

A Masters of Laws degree, also known as a LL.M or Latin Legum Magister, is an advanced legal qualification available to established lawyers with a Juris Doctor. Hoffman earned his Juris Doctor in 2019 from Marquette University Law School and worked as a reporter covering the Chicago justice system while studying at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Lawyers credentialed with a LL.M regularly pursue careers as law professors or, “diplomats, policy advisors and ambassadors,” Hoffman said. The curriculum will send Hoffman to Geneva, Switzerland and London, England for two weeks to study international relations in 2025. Hoffman holds a B.A. from Albion College where he graduated from the Gerald R. Ford Institute.