Creating a New Court System
Newly appointed as acting Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Douglas Amdahl faced the problem of selling a whole new judicial system to the public. When he was first sworn in as an associate justice in 1980, he quickly learned that the Minnesota Supreme Court was at the edge of a breaking point. The Court’s yearly workload had reached 1400-1800 cases, a caseload for nine justices that Amdahl called “absurd.” In this circumstance, Amdahl realized that the Court could decide the case before it but did not have the time to “lay out a road map for how to handle similar situations in the future. . . you were writing, writing, writing unless you were reading, reading, reading. It was just unbelievable.” Indeed, Associate Justice John Simonett remark to him “Doug, you ever feel like we’re living on the edge of panic?”
When then Chief Justice Robert Sheran created a Citizens Conference on the Courts, he appointed Amdahl to chair it. The most significant change proposed from this effort, which finished in March 1981, was to create a court of appeals.
Amdahl was conflicted: he was considering resigning from the Supreme Court because he was so busy that he couldn’t do anything else but work, and he felt lonely in the solitary life of an appellate judge, and not at all proud of the quality of the work the Court was producing. Just as he was contemplating resignation, Sheran came to tell him that he was planning to retire and wanted to recommend Amdahl as the new chief justice if Amdahl would permit him to do so.
Although he took awhile to decide, Amdahl ultimately recognized that the job of Chief would be less isolating as he would have the chance to go out and be with people at various civic and government get-togethers, so Amdahl agreed. He was sworn in as the sixteenth Chief Justice on December 18, 1981, with three priorities: a new court of appeals, a new judicial center, and better compensation for judges.
Selling the idea of a court of appeals to the legal community and the general public was daunting. The labor community and the workers’ compensation bar had learned how the Supreme Court operated, and they were afraid that the Court of Appeals might not be as competent as the Supreme Court, or that they might not have the relationships with the appellate justices that their community enjoyed with the Supreme Court. Indeed, Justice Scott had to set up a meeting with labor leaders to forge an agreement that workers’ compensation appeals would stay with the Supreme Court until there was time to test how the Court of Appeals would work.
Once satisfied, labor provided both money and manpower to sell the idea of a court of appeals to the people, since the Minnesota Constitution had to be amended to provide for it. Justice Amdahl proposed that they should try for a thousand people making the same speech in a thousand places in favor of the Court of Appeals and set up several committees with bar associations and political advocates to achieve that goal. He spent months on the road, speaking to local bar associations and citizens about the need for the new court. Indeed, one bar leader remarked, “Where two or three are gathered together, Amdahl’s there selling the Court of Appeals.”
The Minnesota House approved the constitutional amendment in the spring of 1982, and the Senate approved it by March 1982. The legislature decided that they should pass the proposed amendment and implementing legislation at the same time so that citizens could see what they were voting for. There were a number of contested issues along the way about how the new courts, proposed to be consolidated, should function, such as whether the new system should allow for three-judge district court appeals from county court judges.
On one of his stops in Willmar in summer 1982 selling the constitutional amendment, Justice Amdahl was expounding on the fact that constitutional amendments were not very visible on the ballots, so voters did not pay any attention to them. Since a failure to vote was counted as a “no” vote, which would defeat the amendment, this lack of visibility was a problem for the amendment.
At this, an older woman who had been an election judge raised her hand and said, “Judge Amdahl, I and my people who serve as the election judges have been doing this for many years. We know the mechanics and we don’t worry about that so occasionally, we play games. One of the games we played was that we, one year, told everybody to be sure to look for the constitutional amendments. Eighty-percent of the people voted then on the constitutional amendments. The next year, we didn’t say anything and the vote was down like it used to be, about forty percent.”
Justice Amdahl was inspired. When he got home at midnight that night, he called one judge in every judicial district of the state and said, “You get down to your county auditor tomorrow and tell them to be sure to tell the election judges to tell the voters to look for the constitutional amendments.” That year not only did the Court of Appeals constitutional amendment pass, but every amendment on the ballot also passed.
Early Career
At the end of his first year of law school at Minneapolis-Minnesota College of Law, the school’s trustees hired Amdahl as an assistant registrar, which meant duties as janitor and bookseller as well as record keeping. After he graduated summa cum laude as class valedictorian in 1951, he was named registrar on a part-time basis, serving from 1951-1965, and he practiced law on the side from his law school office for a while. As a staff member and later trustee, he worked hard on the merger of St. Paul College of Law and Minneapolis-Minnesota College of Law into William Mitchell and the move to their new 2100 Summit Avenue building that was constructed for the merged law school.
In 1951 or 1952 (records differ), Amdahl started a practice with George Scott, who would ultimately become an associate justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court. In 1956, Scott left to work for Miles Lord when he became Attorney General. In 1955 or 1956 (his recollection differs from the official biography), Amdahl was appointed Assistant Hennepin County Attorney after the county attorney Matt Dillon was appointed to the bench. Amdahl served as Assistant Hennepin County Attorney until 1961.
As attorney for the county board, Amdahl waded into a number of community fights, including disputes over what to name Minnetonka and Tanager Lakes. One of his most difficult cases was figuring out how to remove over 400 corpses from a pauper’s gravesite, most placed there during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19, so a highway could be built.
Trial Judge
In 1961, after turning down the opportunity to become the Hennepin County Attorney, Amdahl put his name in for a vacancy on the municipal bench caused by the elevation of Judge Luke Sletten to the district court. At the time, governors generally appointed the lawyers who received the most votes in a judicial plebiscite, and Amdahl won handily, so Governor Elmer Andersen appointed him.
Amdahl served as municipal judge for about a year and a half until District Judge Harold Rogers, who was running unopposed, died just days before the general election. Governor Andersen convinced Amdahl to let himself be appointed to the vacancy on November 2, just days before the general election, acknowledging that there might be a lawsuit by the candidate who had filed for the seat immediately after Rogers died. Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld Amdahl’s appointment.
One of Amdahl’s successes as district judge was to create a separate family court, because mingling family law cases with other civil cases wasn’t working very well. Due to his advocacy, Chief Judge John Weeks set up the court, and then appointed Amdahl to it, where he served for three years. Justice Amdahl called this rotation into family court the worst three years of his life.
As Chief Judge of the Fourth District from 1973-1975, Amdahl led the effort to construct a new Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis. In addition to campaigning for funding for the Center, he also exercised significant influence on the design of the judicial chambers, which integrated the chief judge’s office with administration and media spaces so that the public would be integrated with the judges’ spaces. He would serve on the district court until 1980.
In 1965, then Chief Judge Amdahl also created an experimental program, recommended by the Citizens League, to hire law clerks as a way of increasing staff resources available to each judge. His first law student clerk was Samuel Hanson, who later served on the Minnesota Supreme Court. For his efforts, Amdahl became an acknowledged leader among the state’s district court judges.
One of District Court Judge Amdahl’s most controversial cases involved Frank Moulton, one of the most powerful of Minneapolis aldermen. When he was re-elected on a close vote, his opponent filed a lawsuit, known on appeal as Moulton v. Newton (1966), claiming unfair election tactics such as failure to file financial statements and issuance of false campaign statements. Frank Moulton was the most well-known, most powerful politician in the City of Minneapolis. He ran again for election and was elected by a rather close vote over a man who had been fairly unknown before that. The question came up whether Moulton had used fair election tactics. Amdahl set aside the election to public consternation, a decision that was upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court. Because Amdahl remarked on the City Council’s habit of making their decisions in private, he found himself the subject of an editorial cartoon with a hand reaching up for a light bulb and the caption, “Now we know what we’re going to do. Let’s turn on the light.”
On the Supreme Court
Douglas Amdahl was appointed Associate Justice to the Minnesota Supreme Court by Governor Al Quie in 1980, but he was quickly elevated to Chief Justice in 1981 serving until his mandatory retirement in 1989.
Besides the Court of Appeals, one of Amdahl’s other signature achievements as Chief Justice was the completion of the Minnesota Judicial Center. Historically, the location of the Supreme Court had been fraught with tension, since the architect of the capitol had imagined that the Court would get its own building after the Capitol was built. When that didn’t happen, the Supreme Court and the Historical Society jockeyed for space for years.
Drawing on his friendship with U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, also a Minnesotan, Amdahl worked to fund the Judicial Center construction and even brought Burger in to consult on the design of the building, which was completed in 1992. Amdahl convinced then Chief Justice Rehnquist to come to St. Paul to dedicate the building.
Justice Amdahl also oversaw the consolidation of Minnesota’s court system, an effort which was occurring during the drive for the Court of Appeals. Although the justices of the peace had been abolished in 1977 and the municipal courts shortly thereafter, the county courts and district courts were still antagonistic toward each other. Despite misgivings, Amdahl moved to create a unitary district court system to ensure the more efficient functioning of the courts. He also gained legislative approval to use the power of the office of the Chief Justice to move judicial seats from place to place so they could be located where emerging populations and caseloads needed them.
Justice Amdahl led efforts to computerize the courts so that average citizens could understand what was happening in the courts and so they could run more efficiently. An example of the kind of bureaucratic inefficiency that he cited, prior to computerization, was the process for selecting jurors in Hennepin County. Each quarter, the chief judge in Hennepin County would go down to the jury room, put his hand in a barrel which contained little slips with potential jurors’ names, and pick out 3 pounds and 13 ounces of slips, the number of jurors needed for that quarter, less a 25% discard rate for those who had died or moved. To get the names into a barrel, each judge would pin up voter lists and stick pins into the list, taking every 10th name until he or she had 20 names, then repeating this process until each had 300-400 names to turn into the barrel. These names were typed and then the pages cut up to produce the slips for the barrel. After Amdahl got the funds to computerize juror selection, it took about seven minutes to produce the jury list. Moreover, the computerized system avoided the practice of judges adding potential elderly jurors the judge thought might need the jury pay.
Justice Amdahl wrote 554 majority opinions in his years on the court. Among those cases that he cited as being memorable:
—State v. Partlow (1982), involving sexual assault of a three-year old by a 27-year-old babysitter, in which the Court affirmed the 45-month sentence, a slight upward departure under the sentencing guidelines, rather than the 120-month sentence recommended in the presentence report. Justice Amdahl was forced to go on television talk shows and respond to hundreds of letters and phone calls about the inadequacy of the sentencing guidelines to do justice in that case.
—State v. Hamm (1988), in which the Supreme Court (over Amdahl’s dissent) struck down as unconstitutional the six-person jury for misdemeanors permitted by legislation. Because Amdahl prepared the legislature for the decision, it did not cause the furor it might have, and the legislature acted promptly to offer a successful constitutional amendment to voters permitting the six-person jury.
An Always Public Life
After retirement, he was of counsel to the Rider Bennett Egan & Arundel firm in Minneapolis from 1989-99. This gave him the opportunity to pursue some of the civic and personal passions that had marked his entire career, even before he graduated from law school.
Amdahl loved to teach, and he extended his teaching career throughout his life. He served as an adjunct faculty member at William Mitchell College of Law, teaching agency and partnership even when he became a judge. He participated in the Delta Theta Phi law fraternity and was a moot court instructor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
After his days as a student and working at Minneapolis-Minnesota College of Law, Amdahl became a long-time trustee and an active participant in each of the important milestones of the predecessor law schools to Mitchell Hamline. He was involved in the merger of Minneapolis-Minnesota College of Law with Saint Paul College of Law to form William Mitchell in 1956. He worked to help construct the law school’s first building at 2100 Summit Avenue in 1958, and to acquire the 875 Summit Avenue property where the law school now sits from the Our Lady of Peace Academy in 1976, and he continued to help with the development of the Warren E. Burger Library. He was awarded an honorary doctor of letters by William Mitchell in 1987.
Justice Hanson noted that Amdahl was not only an educator, but a role model of professional conduct for students, making himself always available as a counselor for their concerns. Indeed, the success of his mentoring is evidenced by the fact that besides Hanson, his Supreme Court clerk, Eric Magnuson, went on to be Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. But his teaching responsibilities extended to lawyers and judges as well. He was a faculty member and advisor to the National College of the State Judiciary, and a member of the National Board of Trial Advocacy that certifies trial advocacy specialists.
Amdahl also lent his services to organizations working on improvement of the judicial system. He was a member of the International Academy of Trial Judges, which brings together U.S. and foreign judges to discuss the improvement of the judicial systems, as well as the National Center for State Courts. He was also a longtime member and sometime chairman of the Commission on Standards of Judicial Administration (1987-1996), which worked on re-writing the standards for court organization. At home in Minnesota, he participated in the State District Court Judges Association and Conference of Chief Judges.
Amdahl was also an original member of the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission created in 1978 which he had advocated for since he worked in the Hennepin County Attorney’s office. It was the first commission in the nation dedicated to setting out standards to ensure that sentences were uniform, proportionate to the crime, and fair to all, especially eliminating racial disparities in sentencing. Amdahl did much of the guidelines drafting himself. The Commission was so successful nationally that Amdahl spent many hours traveling to other states to discuss Minnesota’s progress, and served on the ABA’s committee on sentencing guidelines as well.
From 1989-1993, Justice Amdahl also served on the Coordinating Council on Life-Sustaining Decision Making by the Courts under the auspices of the National Center for State Courts, tasked with the project of setting out guidelines for judges faced with controversies about ending life support for terminal patients.
Among his peers, Justice Amdahl was ranked first in a survey about the 100 most influential lawyers in the history of Minnesota and first in a list of lawyers and judges called Minnesota’s Legal Hall of Fame.
Personal life
Douglas Amdahl was born on January 23, 1919, in tiny Mabel, Minnesota to Olean and Beaulah Amdahl. Olean was a Norwegian immigrant who was a harness maker and later operated a shoe and shoe repair shop. Beaulah was a schoolteacher and for a while served as the high school principal. Amdahl noted that the town had only one radio, some grocery stores, a drug store and café, a “beer joint” and a couple of clothing stores besides his father’s shop. During high school, Amdahl worked mornings before school at a bakery and then making ice cream for the drug store soda fountain. He also worked on an uncle’s farm. Besides the hardships of the Depression, his family met other tragedies: one brother died at birth, a sister drowned when she was 13, and his other sister suffered from infantile paralysis, which left her disabled.
Starting in 1937, Amdahl worked his way through the University of Minnesota by taking jobs at two restaurants, initially so he could eat; he also worked full-time in the university library. Realizing the war was coming, he went to California to build P-38 aircraft at the Lockheed plant. When he learned that Lockheed had requested a deferment for him, Amdahl quit his job and volunteered for the service but was rejected from both the American and Canadian armies because of his bad eyesight.
Amdahl was eventually allowed to enlist as a cryptologist in the United States Army Air Force Signals Intelligence Service, 924th Aviation Regiment. He was part of a contingent that was flown in and went ashore three days after the D-Day invasion in France. His work, which was coordinating efforts to decrypt German enigma communications, did not put him in the thick of battle, even though he was briefly assigned as a tank commander despite his vision. During the four campaigns in which he traveled through northern France, Ardennes, the Rhineland, and central Europe, he never saw combat, though he received the Certificate of Merit for his service.
After the war, Amdahl returned to finish his last two quarters of business school, graduating in 1945. He then taught business to returning GIs at a school in Mankato. Frustrated with the numbers of students he had to teach, he returned to the Twin Cities and got a job at a finance company before enrolling in Minneapolis-Minnesota College of Law.
Amdahl married his wife Phyllis in 1949, and they went on to have a son and a daughter, Charles and Faith. Phyllis, a member of the Kappa Delta Sorority and the Hennepin County Lawyers Wives Association & Investors Club, predeceased him in 2008, as did his son.
Justice Amdahl was a man of many pursuits. He was a member of many civic organizations and served on several community boards. As Justice Hanson put it, “Chief Justice Amdahl is so multifaceted that any tribute could discuss him in the context of dozens of roles–lawyer, educator, judge, administrator, political activist, community leader, public servant, husband, father, sportsman, adventurer, humanitarian, valued friend, etc.” During his tenure as Chief Justice, Amdahl had a cottage along the Saint Croix River near Hudson, and one of his hobbies was to make mosquito houses. In addition to surviving a plane crash during World War II, he also survived a crash on a fishing expedition to Canada when he was still chief judge.
Justice Amdahl died on August 24, 2010 at the age of 91 and was buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery.
References
*The quotations in this biography are taken from the references below.
Interview by Margaret A. Robertson, Minn. Hist. Soc’y with Douglas K. Amdahl, Chief Justice, Minn. Sup. Ct., in St. Paul, Minn. (Sept. & Dec. 1989)
Samuel L. Hanson, A Tribute to Douglas K. Amdahl, 15 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 9 (1989)
Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Chief Justice Douglas Amdahl: The Best of the Legal Profession, YouTube (Oct. 14, 2009)
Douglas K. Amdahl (Supreme Court of Minnesota), Court Listener (last visited Oct. 1, 2020)
Douglas K. Amdahl, Wikipedia (last visited Oct. 1, 2020)
Minnesota State Law Library Research Guide (Last visited Oct. 1, 2020)