00986_lres1Al Franken’s legal team has made a motion with the Minnesota Supreme Court to officially add a member to its ranks: Lisa Marshall Manheim, one of the few attorneys for either Franken or Norm Coleman who also happens to be a woman. Manheim works for the Seattle office of Perkins Coie, the same firm that employs Franken attorneys Marc Elias (in Washington, D.C.) and Kevin Hamilton (Seattle).

A 2005 graduate of Yale Law School, where she served as managing editor of the Yale Law Journal, Manheim also clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2006 and 2007.

At Yale, according to her Perkins Coie bio (which doesn’t yet mention her experience with election law in Minnesota that Noah Kunin notes in comments below), Manheim “worked closely with counsel for Salim Ahmed Hamdan during the preliminary stages of a case that was eventually addressed by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.”

The motion Franken filed (pdf) would give the out-of-state Manheim standing as an attorney in Minnesota for the state Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments in Coleman’s appeal of an election-contest court decision that Franken won by 312 votes.

It’s the same kind of standing that Coleman sought — and then withdrew without explanation — for Ben Ginsberg, the Bush v. Gore veteran who held forth in the courthouse hallway during the election contest trial.