Sara Rosalie Wahl (née Erwin; August 27, 1924 – July 22, 2013) was an American feminist, lawyer, public defender, clinical law professor, and judge. She was the first woman to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court, which she did for some seventeen years. Governor Rudy Perpich nominated Wahl to the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1977 and Wahl won the election to the seat in a non-partisan election in 1978, defeating three male candidates. She chaired the state's Gender Bias Taskforce and Racial Bias Taskforce and led the American Bar Association's efforts to establish clinical legal education. She was a champion for the mentally ill and for displaced homemakers. She wrote 549 opinions including 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]).
Born in Caney, Kansas, Wahl suffered several traumatic losses early in life. Her mother died when she was three, and her grandmother and Aunt Sara raised her. When she was seven, she opened the railroad crossing gate for their horse-drawn wagon. A late train that had failed to blow its whistle struck and killed her grandfather and younger brother while she watched. A local lawyer required a $100 retainer in order to help them seek restitution, which, as Wahl recounted, "might have well have been a million" during the difficult times of the Depression.
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. 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.
Wahl's foray into political life sought to extend the reach of the county library system, but county board rejected the proposal. After being ushered out of the room and not permitted to observe the board, Wahl decided she was tired of sitting outside of the rooms where men made decisions.
After giving birth to four children, she began attending William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School of Law) at night and gave birth to her fifth child during her second year. One other woman was in her class and only one woman, the law librarian, served on the faculty.
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; he was one of the only legal employers to do so, and many of Minnesota's first women lawyers therefore learned from experience of the legal troubles of the poor. (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.
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 practice of law as opposed to the study of legal opinions. Her courses were popular, with students standing in line all night to get one of the sixty places. Many of those students later became active in her campaign.
Feminist campaign to select a woman to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court
Women rang the doorbells, distributed literature, poured the coffee, served as volunteer office helpers and campaign workers, in essence, did all the chores for state and local politics while the parties chose men to run for office. 1966, Betty Kane had launched a statewide (Democratic Farmer Labor Party) DFL Women's Federation. 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. A report for the DFL Feminist Caucus captured the sense of the day: women were Present but Powerless.
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 District Court by running against an incumbent in 1970.
Both the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus and Minnesota Women Lawyers set out to identify qualified women. MWL formed a committee and sent a questionnaire to all women lawyers asking if they would be willing to serve on boards or on the bench. Wahl had never argued before a woman judge and did not send her questionnaire back for two years.
In January 1977, Rudy 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."
Minnesota's system for selecting judges is non-partisan election. Formally, supreme court justices run for office with no party designation but a designation as incumbent. 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 are rare.
Judith L. Oakes chaired Minnesota Women Lawyers' endorsement committee and it winnowed a list of eighteen names to seven (Doris Huspeni, Phyllis Gene Jones, Roberta Levy, Delores Orey, Susanne C. Sedgwick, Esther Tomljanovich, and Rosalie Wahl). Wahl was also on lists that the Minnesota Women's Political Caucus and DFL Feminist Caucus submitted to Governor Rudy Perpich. University of Minnesota law professor Roberta Levy and Hennepin Municipal Judge Diana Murphy were ultimately the other two finalists. (Levy later became the first woman Hennepin County District chief judge while Murphy was the first woman appointed to the federal bench from Minnesota and was later the first woman appointee to the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals the least gender diverse of all the circuit courts).
Appointment to the Minnesota Supreme Court
When President Carter nominated Senator Walter Mondale's former law partner and associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Harry MacLaughlin, to the federal bench, Minneapolis Star reporter Gwenyth Jones wrote a front-page column reminding the governor and all readers of his promise. Rather than name his appointee as the news of MacLaughlin's elevation broke Governor Perpich instead, announced only that he would appoint a woman.
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 1977. Bird just barely held her seat in 1978 but subsequently lost a retention election in a hard-fought campaign. Carol Connolly promised the governor that she would manage Wahl’s campaign. If Wahl lost, future governors might conclude it was too risky to appoint a woman.