Myriad techniques have been developed over the past several decades to study ideals generated by t-minors of mxn matrices of indeterminates. The varieties they determine are known to be normal, Cohen-Macaulay domains. These results were first due to Hochster and Eagon in 1971. In this talk, we will describe how liason theory can be used to recover the Cohen-Macaulay component of these results and extend them other types of varieties, such as minors of mixed size in a ladder of a symmetric matrix of indeterminates. This approach, due to Gorla, Migliore, and Nagel, also shows that the natural generators of the ideal form a Groebner basis with respect to any diagonal term order. We will close by describing progress on an open problem surrounding another family of ideals conjectured to exhibit these same desirable properties held by determinental ideals. Speaker(s): Patricia Klein (University of Kentucky)