Her Honor: Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement

Chapter Five: Ready to Soar

x 77 xChapter Five Ready to Soar Could I be a judge?” Gently but persistently, that question bubbled inside Rosalie at gatherings of the DFL Feminist Caucus, which she joined not long after its formation in 1973. Electing pro-choice women to the legislature and statewide executive offices was the new group’s highest priority, but its members spoke often about their desire for more women on the bench to secure their legal rights.1 Judicial ambition had been tugging intermittently at Rosalie for several years. Being a lawyer in the state public defender’s office gave her more frequent exposure to the Minnesota Supreme Court than the vast majority of practicing attorneys had. She also came to know and­admire the state’s first female district judge, Hennepin County’s Susanne Sedgwick, through Minnesota Women Lawyers, another organization founded in 1972. Rosalie noted how Sedgwick got to the trial court bench. It wasn’t via the customary gubernatorial appointment. Since statehood, the names on governors’ judicial appointment lists had been uniformly male. Republican governor Harold LeVander’s list in 1970 was no exception . So that year, Republican Sedgwick became a judge the unconventional way: she filed for election as a municipal judge, ran against an incumbent, and won. Four years later, she would become the first woman appointed to the district court bench.2 Rosalie was a moderately active DFLer, participating in precinct caucuses and occasionally attending fundraisers. She wasn’t inclined to run for office, nor did anyone approach her to suggest that she should. Yet watching Sedgwick’s electoral leap into the judiciary kept the question rolling in Rosalie’s mind: “Could I do that? Could I be a judge?”3 That question was not the inspiration for Rosalie’s next career move, “ 78 x Rosalie Wahl and the Minnesota Women’s Movement however. In the spring of 1973, Rosalie’s former professor Doug Heiden­ reich, dean of William Mitchell College of Law, called her with an intriguing offer. Mitchell was establishing a new kind of elective for senior-year law students. It would be a “clinic”—a chance for students to practice law in the service of low-income civil litigants and criminal defendants, under the supervision of professors who would function as attorneys of record on their cases. It was the kind of legal work that was bound to appeal to an idealistic Quaker who had personally felt poverty’s pinch. But it would put its founding professors on the cutting edge of something new and unconventional in legal education. Academic purists scorned it as “trade school stuff.” Launching a law school clinic would be exhilarating, but it would be a step off the customary path to the judiciary. Plans for a clinic at William Mitchell had first taken root when a group of William Mitchell students and a young charismatic professor, Roger Haydock, established a relationship with Legal Aid Society of Minnesota Women Lawyers meeting at the Minnesota State Bar Association convention, June 24, 1974, in Duluth, MN, two years after the group’s organization under that name. Left to right: Irene Scott, Mary Louise Klas, Judith Oakes, Susanne Sedgwick, Corrine Lynch, Charlotte Farish, Mary Walbran, Rosalie Wahl, Patricia Belois, (unknown), Nancy Olkon, Sue Halverson, Camilla Reiersgord, and Cara Lee Neville. Courtesy Minnesota Women Lawyers. Ready to Soar  x 79 Minneapolis and Legal Assistance of Ramsey County in 1972. It allowed student volunteers to represent their indigent clients under the super­ vision of an attorney. The project greatly appealed to Haydock. A gradu­ ate of DePaul University Law School in his native Chicago, Haydock was a Roman Catholic with a calling to service and social justice strong enough for him at one point to consider becoming a priest. Instead, he came to St. Paul to work for Legal Assistance in 1969, having won a competitive national Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship for lawyers willing to spend a year working with the poor. Within a year Haydock was also a part-time instructor at Mitchell; in 1972, he was hired to teach full time, with the understanding that he could explore ways to continue providing legal services to the poor.4 The extracurricular program Haydock established quickly became popular with Mitchell students. Some were drawn to an opportunity to help the disadvantaged. Others recognized that the study of law and the practice of law are not one and the same. Many found that academic...