Byron Starns, '69: "Tenacity Led Southerner to Minnesota, Environmental Law"
Breaking the Ice: Tenacity led Southerner to Minnesota, environmental law
But for Byron Starns’ persistence, the Stinson partner might not have joined the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, played a leading role in the state’s longest environmental enforcement trial and developed his environmental law practice.
The north Florida native was a University of Chicago Law School student in the late 1960s when representatives of then Minnesota Attorney General Doug Head arrived for interviews.
Starns didn’t get hired “because they couldn’t believe a guy from the South was interested in Minnesota,” he recently recalled. He took the initiative the next year, traveling to St. Paul, interviewing again and getting hired by Head in 1969.
Under the next attorney general, Warren Spannaus, Starns in 1973 became deputy attorney general for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and lead trial lawyer in U.S. v. Reserve Mining.
Read more at Minnesota Lawyer