Obituary: Retired Ramsey County jurist Mary Louise Klas, 93, was longtime women’s rights advocate

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
·7 min read

Soon after former Ramsey County District Judge Mary Louise Klas was assigned to oversee cases in family court, she began working to ensure fair treatment for victims of domestic violence.

Charged with issuing protection orders in abuse cases, sometimes more than 100 a month, Klas was horrified by the lack of concern for the victims, most of them women. As for their abusers, she said, the system was protecting them.

“Police weren’t arresting them. Prosecutors weren’t prosecuting them. And judges weren’t trying them,” she told the Pioneer Press in 2000. Women weren’t being protected, she added, despite laws that could guard against such abuses.

Klas went to work revising judicial practices on behalf of victims of domestic violence, said her daughter Patricia Montalbano.

“No one else really had a fire in their belly about the issue,” she said. “She had the attitude, You didn’t wait for someone else to do it. If you saw something that needed to be done, and it was an injustice, it was your moral responsibility to do something. I don’t think she would have even entertained the question, ‘Why you?’ She would have probably said, ‘Why not me? If I know about it, I have a responsibility to address it.’”

Klas, a longtime advocate for women and children, died Friday at her home in St. Paul of complications related to Parkinson’s disease and neuropathy. She was 93.

Klas “was a champion of women’s rights,’’ said Cheryl Thomas, executive director of Minneapolis-based Global Rights for Women, and a longtime friend. “She was a wonderful trainer, volunteer, mentor, and inspiration to women around the world. She showed that it was possible for judges to interpret the law and protect the human rights of victims of domestic violence even in the absence of specific legislation.”

Klas took on leadership roles in the training of new judges, ensuring that the curriculum included sessions on family law and domestic violence, said her daughter Mary Ellen Klas. She also traveled nationally to speak on child-custody issues and to participate in training on domestic-violence issues.

“She said, ‘When we make it safe for women and children to be in their homes, we will make it possible for each of us to be safe on the streets,’” Mary Ellen Klas said.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said Klas, a longtime friend and adviser, helped persuade him to run for the office in 2010.

“She influenced me so much,” Choi said. “When people ask me, ‘Why are you so passionate about gender-based violence, sex trafficking, domestic violence?’ … it was really her. So many of the issues that I prioritize with my public leadership — and just the way that I see the world as a human being — are grounded in many of the conversations I had with her: advocating for system responses for domestic violence and talking about gender-based violence and learning more about human trafficking.”

Klas had a gift for bringing the right people together at the right time and used her “dogged personality … to get things done and get things to change,” he said.

“She was a great strategist and very persistent, too,” he said. “Those are the qualities that really helped her as an advocate. It was very difficult to say ‘No’ to her actually because she was always prepared.”

Mary Louise May was born and raised on St. Paul’s East Side and attended St. Joseph’s Academy for high school on a full scholarship — awarded to the highest-ranking female graduate of St. Paul’s Catholic grade schools. After graduating as valedictorian in 1948, she got a full scholarship from Sisters of St. Joseph to attend St. Catherine University in St. Paul, then called College of St. Catherine. She graduated in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in English and speech.

After graduation, May worked as a secretary for the CIA in Langley, Va., and studied at the University of Vienna. After returning to St. Paul, she began working as an executive assistant in the office of former Gov. Orville Freeman. Friends in the governor’s office encouraged her to go to law school, and she enrolled in 1956 in St. Paul College of Law, now known as Mitchell Hamline School of Law. She was one of three women enrolled at the school at the time, Mary Ellen Klas said.

On the first night of classes, May met Daniel Klas, a Hamline University graduate and history teacher from Wabasha, Minn. She invited him to play bridge one night; he asked her out to a movie.

“The thing about my mom that appealed to my dad was that she was smart and capable,” Mary Ellen Klas said. “That thing about my dad that appealed to my mom was that it didn’t matter at all that she was a woman who was smarter than most of the men who were in the class.”

They were married in 1958 and graduated together in 1960. They had five children; Daniel Klas died in 2017 at 90.

Through her connections from working in the governor’s office, Mary Louise Klas was invited to assist as one of the attorneys in the 1962 gubernatorial recount representing Gov. Karl Rolvaag.

“I was in the early months of pregnancy with our son when we started the trial, and ‘morning’ sickness usually struck in the middle of the afternoon court session,” Klas wrote in a letter to the editor published in the Pioneer Press in 2009. “Both sets of lawyers brought back from lunch their cellophane-wrapped soda crackers for me to choke down — surreptitiously, of course.”

After the election, Rolvaag appointed her to the Youth Conservation Commission, whose goal was “to provide and conduct a program looking toward the prevention of juvenile and youth delinquency.” She served on the commission for nine years.

The Klases established their own joint law practice, Klas & Klas, in 1973. Mary Louise Klas also began serving as a referee in juvenile court and started focusing her private practice in family law. As she recalled, “I began to notice that the family law cases were the active ones on my desk while the probate and other files got pushed to the credenza.”

In 1986, Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed her as the first woman on the bench in Ramsey County District Court. She didn’t join the family court for two years, however, because she wanted to “get her bearings in the other areas of the law first,” Mary Ellen Klas said.

Robin Phillips, executive director of Minneapolis-based Advocates for Human Rights, appeared before Klas on pro bono cases when she was a young lawyer.

“She was fair, tough and intolerant of attempts to avoid liability on domestic-violence cases,’’ Phillips said. “She was known for taking pro bono cases very seriously and defending the rights of the economically marginalized.”

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Klas was a conscientious and organized jurist who was known to write personalized thank-you notes to each juror serving in her court, even following up with one juror’s employer — McDonald’s — to ensure she would get paid for the extra two days the trial lasted, Montalbano said.

Klas served on the bench for 14 years. After reaching the mandatory judicial retirement age of 70 in 2000, she continued her advocacy work and used her years of experience in legal reform work and judicial training to assist human-rights advocates in Central and Eastern Europe draft new laws and establish legal systems to combat domestic violence, Mary Ellen Klas said.

She traveled to Bulgaria with the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights six times to train judges, police and legal professionals from Balkan countries, and to the Republic of Georgia, when she was in her 80s, she said.

“She embodied what it meant to use one’s authority and influence to address the insidious brutality that so many women face in their homes,’’ said Thomas, who traveled with Klas on many of the trips as director of the Women’s Program at the Advocates for Human Rights. “So few powerful people do that.”

In an interview with the Pioneer Press in 2006, Klas said: “What have we left to fight for if human rights and human dignity and the rights of everyone — poor and wealthy — are not safeguarded equally? What do we have left?”

Klas is survived by her daughters Mary Ellen Klas, Kathy Thames, Barbara Klas and Patricia Montalbano, and by her son, John Klas; 13 grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.

A funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. July 10 at the Church of St. Thomas More in St. Paul, with visitation from 3 to 6 p.m. July 9 at Willwerscheid Funeral Home in St. Paul.