Rosalie Wahl was born as Sara Rosalie Erwin on August 27, 1924 in Gordon, Kansas, the third daughter of four children born to Claude William and Gertrude (Patterson) Erwin. Growing up in the Depression era, Wahl experienced tremendous personal hardship. Her mother died when Wahl was three years old and she, with her sisters and brother, moved to live with her maternal grandparents on a farm near Birch Creek, Kansas. Four years later, Wahl's grandfather and brother were killed by a train after she opened a gate that led from the farm to the creek across a set of railroad tracks. She spent the remainder of her childhood on that same farm in Birch Creek and was raised by her grandmother with help from her mother's sister, Sara Patterson.
In 1942 Wahl entered the University of Kansas intending to pursue a journalism degree. The following summer she returned to Birch Creek to teach. Her fiancé, an air force serviceman, died the next winter in a training accident. Wahl describes herself at this time as torn between choosing a life of poetry and mysticism or following a path of social and political activism. 1 Determined to pursue a field where she could help people, Wahl went back to the University where she edited the campus newspaper and became involved with the campus YWCA where she helped form a women's interracial residential cooperative. During this time Wahl became a Quaker. In 1946 she graduated with a degree in sociology and though she had planned to go to California to work with migrants she instead married Roswell Wahl, a family friend and mechanical engineer.
Wahl's first child was born in 1947 and, in 1949, the family moved to Circle Pines, Minnesota to participate in a newly-formed cooperative community. Three more children were born while the family lived in Circle Pines and then, in 1955, the family moved to a former dairy farm in Lake Elmo where Rosalie Wahl has lived since.
In 1962 at the age of 38 and "tired of sitting outside doors waiting for the men inside to make the decisions," 2 Wahl entered the William Mitchell School of Law. Her fifth and last child was born in 1964. In 1967 she graduated with her law degree and passed the state bar examination. Immediately thereafter she began working for the state as an assistant public defender. In 1972, the same year she and her husband divorced, Wahl taught criminal law at the University of Minnesota. The following year she accepted a professorship at William Mitchell where she directed the clinical legal education program. This was both an experimental and controversial program as students, under supervision and in cooperation with the state's public defender office, were representing indigent defendants in criminal court proceedings.
In 1977 Governor Rudy Perpich appointed Wahl to the Supreme Court to replace Harry H. MacLaughlin. Wahl's appointment was significant as she was the first woman jurist to sit on the state's highest court. While on the Supreme Court, Wahl served as its liaison to the Court's Study Commission on the Mentally Disabled and also chaired its task forces on gender fairness and racial bias. These committees gathered information through public hearings, questionnaires, and court statistical data that was used to evaluate the judicial system and its proceedings. The findings and recommendations made by these committees were used to implement changes within the judicial system through training sessions, procedural rulings, and legislation.
Wahl sustained her earlier interest in clinical training and professional development throughout her judicial career by participating in the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association. She chaired that section in 1987-1988 and proposed the formation of a study group headed by Robert MacCrate to examine the continuum between legal education and practice. Wahl's own role in this study group was to chair a subcommittee that drafted a statement on fundamental lawyering skills and professional values.
Elected to the court in 1978 and successively reelected in 1984 and 1990, Wahl retired at the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1994. When she retired, women held four of the seven Supreme Court seats.
1 Deborah J. Fisher, "Rosalie Wahl: Beyond the Little House on the Prairie," Twin Cities Woman, June 1978, sec. 2.
2 Quoted by Donna Halvorsen in "Judge Wahl Leaves Historic and Personal Mark on Supreme Court," Star Tribune, August 28, 1994, sec. A.
Additional biographical information was taken from the collection.
From the guide to the Rosalie Wahl papers., 1958-1998 (bulk 1977-1994)., (Minnesota Historical Society)
