Minnesota federal judge, appointed by Reagan, marks 40 years on the bench

Dec. 5—Paul Magnuson was well into his career as an attorney in South St. Paul when U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger, R-Minn., called one day with a job offer.

U.S. District Court Judge Edward Devitt had decided to step back from full-time duty, Durenberger told Magnuson, so there was going to be an open seat on the bench. "He said, 'Hey, Mag, Ed took senior status. Do you want to be judge?'" Magnuson recalled.

Magnuson told Durenberger that Keith Hughes, an attorney and state senator from St. Cloud, should get the job. "Ten minutes later, he called me back and said, 'No, Keith says you should be judge,'" Magnuson said. "That was the essence of it. We went through a bunch of dog-and-pony-show stuff, but that was essentially it."

Forty years later, Magnuson, 84, is still serving.

Magnuson was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in November 1981. He moved to senior status in 2002, but has continued to serve essentially full time. His tenure on the federal bench in Minnesota is second only to U.S. District Court Judge Gunnar Nordbye, a President Herbert Hoover appointee who served from 1931 to 1977.

"I'm not going to bet that I can beat that, but I have the runner-up position," Magnuson said.

Magnuson, who served as chief judge from 1994 to 2001, said he plans next year to move out of his coveted corner chambers on the top floor of the Warren E. Burger Federal Building in downtown St. Paul and begin decreasing his caseload.

"One of my clerks said last year I had about the same number of cases as the active judges," he said. "I didn't intend to do that; I intended to do less. I'm consciously working now on winding that down."

FROM ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE TO LAW SCHOOL

Magnuson's 40-year tenure "reflects the steadfastness of his commitment to serve the country and the rule of law," said U.S. District Court Judge Eric Tostrud.

"He is an exemplary servant leader," Tostrud said. "He sets a great example for the rest of us. He's direct. He has the ability to identify what matters most, whether it be an issue in a case or any other issue confronting the court, and the disposition to get right to it. He also does the job with quiet humility. He runs a tight courtroom without drawing attention to himself."

Said Chief Judge John Tunheim: "He has the best of the judicial temperament: a willingness to listen carefully, to study the issues carefully and to decide them in a very fair manner. He is not ideological in any way; he is a very fair and careful judge, and I think that's what we all appreciate. He's someone that we in the judiciary would call a judge's judge — that means that he really does his work the right way all the time."

Born and raised on a farm in Carthage, S.D., Magnuson attended a one-room schoolhouse for elementary school and was one of 13 students in his high school graduating class. Magnuson went to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, where he served as president of the Student Senate and majored in business and history and minored in economics and political science.

After he graduated in 1959, Magnuson said he knew he "didn't want to go back to the farm because the work was too hard. I thought I was going to go into business, but once I started interviewing with the corporate structures — I have a little independent streak and I could just not see myself doing that."

He considered applying to Valparaiso University Law School in Indiana, when he got a call from the chairman of the board at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. "He was recruiting a registrar for the law school, and so I went up and became registrar and student," he said. The job came with free tuition and "a little spending money," he said.

He later became a claims adjuster for Anchor Casualty Co., working during the day and going to law school at night.

Magnuson served as class president at William Mitchell and clerked for the St. Paul law firm of Bertie & Bettenburg during his last year of law school. After graduating in 1963, he took a job at LeVander, Gillen, Miller & Durenberger in South St. Paul, where he specialized in eminent domain and municipal law. He became a partner and worked at the firm for 18 years.

'LAWYER AS COUNSELOR'

Between his work as an attorney and a judge, Magnuson estimates he's participated in about 500 jury trials. During his first 15 years on the bench, he heard about 35 jury trials a year. "It was just out of one courtroom and into the next. Boom, boom, boom," he said.

Now, he said, he rarely has trials in his courtroom.

"In the earlier days, it was more swashbuckling," he said. "You went out and threw it in front of the jury and saw what happened. Now there are so many depositions and other discovery things that cause people to have a real solid knowledge of their case, and that gives them a pretty good idea of the value, if you will, of the case. They end up settling. Good people doing their job will recognize where it will fall."

One of Magnuson's most high-profile cases was in 2003, when he had to determine who owned the Mall of America. Twelve years later, he presided over the Target Corp. data-breach case — a class-action lawsuit that affected 13 million people, he said.

"While we spend a lot of time talking about lawyers and litigation, the reality is that we're in the people business," Magnuson said. "What we do to any person who is involved is oftentimes the most important thing that occurs in their life. You think of this guy sitting in the crowbar hotel, who has been wrongfully put there, who files a habeas case (to try to get released). That is incredibly important to that person."

Assistant Washington County Attorney Kevin Magnuson said his father has always been a firm believer in "lawyer as counselor."

"He believes lawyers have the ability to do a tremendous amount of good in people's lives," he said. "In the back of his mind, there was always the small-town lawyer who did everything for everybody, kind of like the preacher, the barber and the doctor. It was always, in his mind, a really noble profession and one that is really oriented to solving problems and helping people — both of which he is very good at because he has tremendous judgment. He is very wise, but he is also very unassuming and humble, so he doesn't shove things down their throats."

His father's legal opinions are not written to be "read and venerated and studied in law school," Kevin Magnuson said.

"He really does not see his role as writing this marvelous opinion; that's for the appellate courts," he said. "He sees himself as calling balls and strikes. You try to make the narrowest ruling you can on a matter. You solve a problem. You resolve the legal issue that is before you — nothing more. He's trying to mete out justice efficiently, and part of doing that is to not do too much."

FAITH-BASED LIVING

In addition to hearing cases in Minnesota, Magnuson spent years hearing cases in U.S. District Court in Florida. He started out going two weeks a year to help alleviate that district's backlog of cases, but later extended his stays to include February, March and April. He divided his time between Fort Myers and Jacksonville; his law clerks would take turns filling the Florida assignment a month at a time.

Magnuson and his current and former law clerks gather each year for a reunion at The Lexington in St. Paul. The gatherings are referred to as meetings of the Lake Elmo Federal Bar Association; Magnuson lived in Lake Elmo for decades.

"It's pretty typical for judges to have a close relationship with their alumni clerks, but I think Dad's is really special," Kevin Magnuson said. "That has a lot to do with the kind of people he chooses — they are typically people who get along well with each other and like each other."

Anita Terry, Magnuson's permanent clerk, said her boss came to see her in 2002 at St. Joseph's Hospital in downtown St. Paul after the birth of her daughter, Caroline. A friend, who was visiting from Iowa, commented on the judge's attire after he left the hospital room, she said.

"She said, 'He was wearing Dickies,'" she said. "And I'm like, 'Yeah, he's just a regular guy.' That's the best thing about him. He's never had black-robe disease. He calls me and says, 'Anita, this is Paul,' and I think, 'I will never in my life call you Paul.' But that's just who he is. He's a humble, just genuine guy who takes the job seriously — but doesn't take himself too seriously and that is exactly what we want in this country for our jurists, it seems to me."

Magnuson and his first wife, Sharon, had four children. Sharon died in 2007; their daughter Margaret died in 1997. He and his second wife, Elaine Torrey Holmen Magnuson, celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary on Nov. 26. The couple are members of St. Lucas Community Church in Lake Elmo, and Magnuson participates in a weekly Bible study.

A copy of Micah 6:8 hangs on the wall of his office: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

"Every time I walk out, I see that," he said. "Faith-based living is important because you know there is something bigger than yourself, and you can rely on that in making the decisions that we are required to make."

WORK SPREAD OVERSEAS

His office bookshelves are filled with mementos from international trips. There's a white felt hat from Kyrgyzstan, a flag from Rwanda, and a figurine from Albania — all countries where Magnuson has helped leaders establish and sustain independent judiciaries.

Magnuson has traveled to 53 countries and is considered "the foremost leader within the judiciary for doing international rule-of-law development," Tunheim said. "I have done a lot, but I pale in comparison to Judge Magnuson. He really has been my inspiration for going to a lot of these foreign countries and helping them understand the importance of an independent judiciary and the importance of democratic values."

Magnuson also has been instrumental in helping bring judges from other countries to the United States to learn about the American judicial system, government and culture. More than 200 judges have visited Minnesota as part of delegations from Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, China and elsewhere.

Magnuson's international work started in the mid-1990s, when he was asked to fill in for Eighth Circuit Judge Myron Bright on an educational trip to China; Bright threw his back out a week before he was to leave. "He called me and said, 'Hey, Mag, you got a passport?' I said, 'Uh, yeah, why?' He said, 'I want you to go to China for me next week.'"

While in China, Magnuson ended up with a free weekend, so he flew to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to visit friends whom he had met in Lake Elmo. "I had a delightful time with them and an extremely delightful meeting with the chief justice of the Mongolian Supreme Court," he said. "We sat in one of those gers (yurts) all afternoon and just talked law."

When he got back to Minnesota, Magnuson wrote up a trip report, which "caught the imagination of the people in Washington," he said. That led to an appointment to the International Judicial Relations Committee, a committee of the United States Judicial Conference, which he later chaired.

Over the past 30 years, he has worked in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Albania and Rwanda, among other places.

Magnuson's work in Albania began one day in the late 1990s when Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist called him into his office and handed him a letter from the chief judge of the Supreme Court of Albania. "Essentially what the letter said was, 'I understand that you have an independent, ethical judiciary. Please come to Albania and tell us what that is,'" he said. "That was the essence of the letter. The chief justice asked me to go and do that, and I did."

He has made almost 20 trips to Albania. "With all of the work he's done in Albania, I consider him almost a member of the Albanian Supreme Court," Tunheim said.

But Magnuson said he is most proud of his work in post-genocide Rwanda.

After an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994, Magnuson helped establish community-based "gacaca," or grass courts — called that because they met outdoors — to try genocide criminals.

Rather than go through a formal court process, the gacaca worked to bring an entire village together to hear from all the parties where a crime took place, with village elders acting as judges. The gacaca promoted ownership of guilt by perpetrators, forgiveness by victims, and reconciliation as a way to move forward, Magnuson said.

"Being from Minnesota, I knew about the circles of justice in our Native community," Magnuson said. "I knew that it was a rough justice, but it works. Rwanda is now a very peaceful country."

The U.S. judicial system remains the gold standard, Magnuson said.

"I am such a thorough believer in the jury system," he said. "Juries just get it right. We are unique in the world with juries in both civil and criminal cases, and it is the basic underpinning of everything we do. I've got the best job in the world."