Rosalie E. Wahl

The Minnesota Historical Society published Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Lori Sturdevant's book, Her Honor: Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women's Movement, in 2014.

She spearheaded and chaired the state taskforce on gender fairness and the courts; Minnesota was the sixth state to conduct such a study.  She then went on to chair the racial bias taskforce.  She was a longtime champion of the rights of the mentally ill.  “What is not so well known in the state where she lives is that Wahl’s contributions to legal education may have more national impact than her work as a state supreme court justice.” Wahl was the first woman to chair the American Bar Association’s Accreditation Committee as well as the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar where she shrewdly and skillfully put together the strategy for expanding clinical legal education. She was a pivotal member of the National Association of Women Judges which awarded her the Joan Demsey Klein award honoree of the year award in 2004. The Minnesota State Bar Association named an annual award in her honor. Minnesota Women Lawyers named its annual lecture in her honor.

"Rosalie Wahl was a trailblazer for our state, both as a lawyer and as the first woman to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court. While on the court she led efforts to address both gender fairness and racial bias in our state's justice system. She will be remembered with fondness and respect for her unwavering commitment to the principle of equal justice for all." In an interview with Peter Shea done in 2003 she talks about her post-retirement role as a "public citizen," including her work as a peace activist.

Wahl had an enormous impact on the law, women’s equality, the legal system, and legal education.  She wrote 549 opinions over seventeen years.  She looked at the judicial system from the bottom up, championing the underdog, the marginalized, or the outcast, such as criminal defendants.  She believed that Minnesota’s constitution held the government to a higher standard of rationality than the federal constitution did the national government and argued for a more expansive interpretation of individual rights than under the U.S. Constitution (Larson 2000).  She wrote for the majority in holding that different penalties for crack and powder cocaine were unconstitutional in State v. Russell (477 N.W.2d 886 [Minn.1993]).  Her opinions on race and sex discrimination were especially important.  She had what her former clerk, Jane Larson, called “her longest running struggle with other members of the supreme court” over how to interpret statutes allowing for the availability of permanent rather than rehabilitative maintenance for long-term homemaker spouses.  Wahl would often say that she thought men had trouble understanding the experience of a midlife woman whose husband is divorcing her.

Until Wahl retired in 1994, the Minnesota Supreme Court was the first state in history to have a majority (4 of 7) women justices.  Research on the effects of increasing numbers of women on the Minnesota Supreme Court showed little effect in voter participation in judicial races, an increased willingness on the part of lawyers to appeal women’s rights cases (which peaked at three justices), and some reports of an altered courtroom atmosphere.  Kathleen Blatz, a Republican, became the first woman chief justice in 1998, holding that office until 2006.  As Connolly concludes: “What once seemed unthinkable has become a yawn.”

Wahl served on the court until her retirement in 1994. She remained active in the community, regularly attending meetings from the Minnesota Women’s Consortium to Minnesota Women Lawyers, raising money for groups such as Leaders of Today and Tomorrow that encourages college-aged women to aspire to political leadership positions, and actively protesting the war in Iraq.

Republican Governor Al Quie appointed a second woman, Jeanne Coyne to the Supreme Court in 1982.  Wahl recounts that prior to that, she had not realized how isolated she actually was.  Wahl retained her seat easily without challenge in 1984.  Perpich went on to appoint more women than had been appointed by all of the previous governors of Minnesota combined.  He was the first governor to select a woman, Marlene Johnson, as his running mate for lieutenant governor.  Most of the women on Perpich’s first short list ultimately were appointed to the state or federal bench, if not the Minnesota Supreme Court.  Justice Tomljanovich recounted, “He appointed a lot of women without real big track records, and that was a real big risk, but it made a revolution.”

Mattson ran a series of negative ads giving reasons to vote against Wahl.  He claimed she had a poor win/loss record before the Supreme Court.  Another ad, patterned after the campaign against Rose Bird in California, charged that “Ms. [sic] Wahl lets rapists loose.”  (She was the sole dissenter in State v. Willis, (269 N.W.2d [Minn. 1978]) a case of a rapist who had held his victim at knifepoint.  Wahl had dissented because a trial court had suppressed evidence and the police had unlawfully searched the defendant’s house.)  Another ad charged she let drug dealers loose.

Rosalie Wahl was the highest vote getter on the ballot in November 1978, holding on to her seat.  She became the tenth woman serving on a state supreme court in 1977. Four important factors helped ensure Wahl’s electoral success.  First, her colleagues supported her, unlike Chief Justice Rose Bird who ultimately failed to retain her seat in California.  She described her colleagues: "Justice Otis, Chief Justice Sheran, Justice Rogosheske, Justice Peterson, Justices Kelley, Yetka, Todd, and Scott—were my friends, my court, some of the finest men I have ever known.  I realized when I joined the court that my colleagues were all very much themselves.  They were just who they were and they did me the honor of just going on and being that way.  There was only one of me and I said little until I learned my way."

Formally, supreme court justices run for office with no party designation, but in practice, sitting justices inform the governor when they are going to step down, and the governor nominates a replacement when the retirement is announced, allowing the nominee to run as an incumbent.  If a justice was appointed more than a year before the next election, he or she had to stand in the next one, and then again every six years.  As of 1977, only one member of the Minnesota Supreme Court, C. Donald Peterson, had obtained his seat by election rather than appointment.  The last incumbent unseated in an election was in 1900.  Serious challenges to sitting justices were rare.

Perpich knew that the first woman appointed would have many challengers who wanted a seat on the Supreme Court.  If she were defeated, he would then have squandered the power to shape the bench. Another unpredictable populist governor, Jerry Brown of California, had appointed a woman, Rose Bird, as the first woman and the first chief justice of the California Supreme Court in February of 1977.  Bird just barely held her seat in 1978 but subsequently lost a retention election in a vicious campaign.

In 1978, St. Paul attorney and chair of the Minnesota Women Lawyers endorsement committee Judith Oakes would reflect that "no other government appointment has stirred as much emotion as Wahl." On Friday, June 3 1977, at a gathering of nearly 4,500 women meeting in St. Cloud Minnesota to hammer out a platform and choose delegates to the upcoming White House Conference on Women in Houston, conference chair Minnesota Secretary of State Joan Growe announced that Governor Rudy Perpich would appoint Rosalie Wahl to the state supreme court—the first woman and its 72nd justice.  The crowd erupted as Wahl came to the microphone.  Wahl promised to "not cease to be an advocate for those whose rights have been denied or infringed. . . . I am remembering tonight, all those generations of women who have gone before us.  I am remembering Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as a little girl in the mid-1820s, walking into her father's law office with a pair of sharp scissors and a novel plan to amend the laws by cutting from his law books all the bad laws he had shown her 'that made so many women cry'. . . . I am remembering that remarkable Quaker, Susan B. Anthony, who met Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the Second Women's Rights convention in 1852 . . . they knew scorn, fury, hardship, adventure, agonizing disappointment.  And they never even saw the promised land.  I am remembering Mary Peek's grandmother, Kari Sougstand Anderson, as a young woman in Norway, refusing to marry the man chosen by her father, asking for her dowry, coming to the new world alone, knowing no English—as an old woman of 78 years, being the first person in line to vote at the first election after the ratification of the 19th Amendment.  I am remembering Sojourner Truth—and all those brave, unnamed, unremembered women, who gave so much that we might have the freedom and opportunity that is ours."

Her experience as a public defender led William Mitchell College of Law to hire her to establish a criminal and civil law clinic in 1973.  Law clinics expose students to the nuts and bolts of legal practice as opposed to appellate doctrinal exegesis.  She taught around sixty clinical students a year in addition to an appellate law seminar.  "Students stood in line all night before registration to be assured of a place in the clinic." The close bonds she formed with students and colleagues would help her in her campaign.

Esther Wattenberg's report for the DFL Feminist Caucus captured the sense of the day: women were Present but Powerless. The DFL Women's Caucus replaced the DFL Women's Federation in 1971 and morphed into the DFL Feminist Caucus in 1973 to fight for feminism within the party—to pressure the party to run more women candidates and to ensure that DFL candidates were pro-choice.  In January of 1977, Perpich formally addressed the DFL Feminist Caucus, the first governor to do so.   In response to a question, Perpich promised to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court with a woman leading to banner newspaper Minneapolis Star headlines the next day saying "Woman in top court promised."

Although women were gaining entry into law schools and their numbers inched upwards in the 1970a, few served as judges.  In 1977, no woman had served on the U.S. Supreme Court, only one woman sat on a federal appellate court, and only five other women served on state supreme courts.  The first woman to serve as a Minnesota trial court judge, Susanne C. Sedgwick, a Republican, acquired a seat on the Hennepin County court by running against an incumbent in 1970.

C. Paul Jones hired Wahl for the newly created public defender's office as an Assistant State Public Defender when she graduated in 1967 and allowed her to work part time.  (Wahl divorced in 1972.)  This work gave her experience defending the indigent but also provided numerous opportunities for appellate oral argument; she argued 109 cases before the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Women did a lot of the work in state and local politics but were rarely tapped to run for office.  1966, Betty Kane had launched a statewide (Democratic Farmer Labor Party) DFL Women's Federation.  Yet there remained "a pervasive feeling that women were still being courted to act as the party's chore doers.  They rang the doorbells, distributed literature, poured the coffee, served as volunteer office helpers and campaign workers.  But they were rarely encouraged to seek delegate seats or elective office.

A Quaker since college, Rosalie grew up Methodist.  In college, she worked to fight racism through the YWCA and lived in a racially-integrated communal home at the University of Kansas in the 1940s.  Having begun as a journalism major, she edited the Daily Kansan and became interested in the cooperative movement.  She dropped out and taught in the one-room school in Birch Creek that she herself had attended after her fiancé who had enlisted in the Air Force died in a military training accident in 1943. She returned to school and earned her undergraduate degree in Sociology from the University of Kansas in 1946. She later met, married, and moved to Minnesota with her husband, Roswell Wahl, and lived with friends on forty acres north of Circle Pines at what they hoped would be an intentional community.

Sara Rosalie Wahl (née Erwin; August 27, 1924 – July 22, 2013) was an American lawyer and judge and the first woman to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Fourth, Mattson’s negative campaign backfired.  The Minnesota State Bar Association, worried about the issue of judicial independence and uneasy about judicial elections, came to Wahl’s defense.  Chief Justice Sheran talked to friends at the Bar Association and they wrote a letter to the paper denouncing Mattson’s ads The Minneapolis Tribune editorialized against “Mattson’s Injudicious Campaign” on October 22nd, saying his distortion of Wahl’s office rendered him unfit for office.  Wahl said she was lucky to face Mattson, in a way, “because a lot of lawyers did not think really highly of him.”