Rosalie Wahl

Sara Rosalie Wahl (née Erwin; August 27, 1924 – July 22, 2013) was an American feminist, lawyer, public defender, clinical law professor, and judge and the first woman to serve on the Minnesota Supreme Court where she served for seventeen years. Governor 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]). Early life and education 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. Early career