Judge Klas championed rights long after leaving bench

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Those who knew Mary Louise Klas say that when she died on June 9 at age 93, the world lost a trailblazing crusader for women’s rights.

Klas was one of only three women in her class at St. Paul College of Law (a William Mitchell College of Law predecessor) in the 1950s and became the first woman on the Ramsey County District Court bench when Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed her in 1986. Presiding over cases in Family Court, Klas became aware of the consequences of domestic violence and failures in the legal system to protect women.

That awareness launched a crusade to prevent domestic violence through educating judges and human-rights advocates about the issue. Her efforts began while she was still on the bench and continued after she reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2000.

Her quest to recognize and strengthen women’s rights wasn’t restricted to Minnesota. She traveled nationally and internationally to speak and train human-rights advocates about developing new laws to protect women from domestic violence.

In her 80s, Klas traveled to Bulgaria six times with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights to train judges and legal professionals.

Klas traveled with Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights to Bulgaria six times to train judges, police and legal professionals from Balkan countries and to the Republic of Georgia.

Cheryl Thomas, executive director of Global Rights for Women, accompanied Klas on several of those trips when Thomas was the director of the Women’s Program of the Advocates for Human Rights, and she remembers the impact Klas had.

The U.S. — and Minnesota and a couple of other states in particular — were far ahead of the rest of the world in establishing legal protections against domestic abuse.

“This was way before the United Nations had articulated violence against women as a human-rights violation,” Thomas said. “And Mary Lou had been working on it as a judge in Minnesota for years before that happened.”

Observing Klas in those settings, Thomas recalls that she saw her judicial demeanor on display and how people responded to it.

“The participants in the training were riveted. Here was a judge — brilliant, compassionate, dedicated — who was telling them, ‘You have a responsibility to enforce your laws to protect victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. So it was new information for them from a colleague.”

Thomas describes Klas’ legacy as “unparalleled.”

“There were just a few people at the forefront of that movement back then,” she said, “and Mary Lou was one of them.”

Allison Burke, director of development and alumni relations at Mitchell Hamline, knew Klas from their mutual involvement in a fund-raising committee for the school.

“She was a very energetic person; her belief in herself was sort of contagious,” Burke recalls. “She was just very driven to get things done.”

Robin Phillips, executive director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, represented clients in pro bono cases as a young attorney with Briggs and Morgan. Klas, she recalls, “was a real champion of legal aid for people who are economically marginalized or marginalized in other ways. Part of what she did was championing the cause of people taking the cases and making sure that people treated their clients the same as a paying client.”

After Phillips left to join the Advocates, Klas joined the organization as a volunteer.

“We did a lot of work on domestic violence,” Phillips says. “When we had foreign visitors, partners from overseas, we’d bring them over to Mary Lou’s court and she’d talk to them about how she treats domestic violence cases and how serious they were. So after we did a few of those visits, we invited her to go overseas with us to do trainings overseas.”

Rosalyn Park, the director of the Women’s Human Rights Program for the Advocates, accompanied Klas on some of those trips and contends that she left a “global imprint” on the development of domestic abuse laws.

“She could bring Minnesota’s history and long years of practice implementing its domestic violence laws and the changes we’ve seen to other countries that were just starting out. She really played a huge role in standard setting based on what she knew first hand here in Minnesota and seen work and not work. That was huge because a lot of these countries were just starting to pass domestic violence laws or they didn’t even have an order for protection law.”

It may seem amazing that such an influential person encountered closed professional doors when she was a young woman. Like Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor, began her career at a time when women lawyers were rare — and the few who existed faced formidable barriers in getting hired.

After graduating from the College of St. Catherine in 1952, Mary Louise May worked as an executive assistant to Gov. Orville Freeman. In 1956 she enrolled at St. Paul College of Law, where she met classmate Daniel Klas. They married two years later. (Daniel Klas died in 2017.)

The Klases raised five children and Mary Louise maintained a part-time practice while Daniel worked for the St. Paul city attorney. In 1973, the Klases launched their own husband-and-wife law firm, with Mary Louise focusing her practice on family law. That firm continued until Perpich appointed Mary Louise to the Ramsey County bench in 1986.

The Klases’ middle child, Barbara Klas, followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a lawyer. After receiving her J.D. from Mitchell Hamline in 1991, she practiced for several years as a litigator and today is a consultant with Price Waterhouse Cooper.

Barbara did observe her mother in court a few times and admits that she found her courtroom demeanor unsurprising.

“She was amazing on the bench, but I think my siblings would agree with me that we didn’t have to observe her in the courtroom to know what it was like. She was strict; you knew that when you entered Judge Klas’ courtroom you’d better be prepared — and that’s what it was like in our household.”

But it was also a happy and loving household, she recalls.

“She always instilled in us this sense of ‘you can be anything you want to be’ — this sense of confidence and self-possession, this sense of genderless boundaries.”

Lawyers have told Barbara how much they appreciated Judge Klas. Although she might be strict in the courtroom, they told her it was different if they had pretrial conferences in her chambers.

“She was an amazing cook and baker. Often she’d have fresh scones and invite the co-counsels to have a fresh scone and coffee and they would just have a conversation. If she knew the lawyers, she’d say, ‘It’s OK; you don’t have to call me your honor or judge; just call me Mary Lou.’”