Soon after former Ramsey County District Judge Mary Louise Klas was assigned to oversee cases in family court, she began working to make sure fair treatment for victims of domestic violence.
Charged with issuing protection orders in abuse cases, sometimes greater than 100 a month, Klas was horrified by the shortage of concern for the victims, most of them women. As for his or her 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 might guard against such abuses.
Klas went to work revising judicial practices on behalf of victims of domestic violence, said her daughter Patricia Montalbano.
“Nobody else really had a fireplace of their belly concerning the issue,” she said. “She had the attitude, You didn’t wait for another person to do it. If you happen to 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 query, ‘Why you?’ She would have probably said, ‘Why not me? If I find out about it, I even have a responsibility to deal with it.’”
Klas, a longtime advocate for girls and youngsters, 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 ladies’s rights,’’ said Cheryl Thomas, executive director of Minneapolis-based Global Rights for Women, and a longtime friend. “She was an exquisite trainer, volunteer, mentor, and inspiration to women all over 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 within the absence of specific laws.”
Klas took on leadership roles within the training of recent judges, ensuring that the curriculum included sessions on family law and domestic violence, said her daughter Mary Ellen Klas. She also traveled nationally to talk on child-custody issues and to take part in training on domestic-violence issues.
“She said, ‘Once we make it secure for girls and youngsters to be of their homes, we’ll make it possible for every of us to be secure 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 a lot,” Choi said. “When people ask me, ‘Why are you so enthusiastic about gender-based violence, sex trafficking, domestic violence?’ … it was really her. So lots of the issues that I prioritize with my public leadership — and just the way in which that I see the world as a human being — are grounded in lots of the conversations I had along with her: advocating for system responses for domestic violence and talking about gender-based violence and learning more about human trafficking.”
Klas had a present for bringing the best people together at the best time and used her “dogged personality … to get things done and get things to alter,” he said.
“She was a fantastic strategist and really persistent, too,” he said. “Those are the qualities that basically helped her as an advocate. It was very difficult to say ‘No’ to her often because she was at all times prepared.”
Mary Louise May was born and raised on St. Paul’s East Side and attended St. Joseph’s Academy for top 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 on the University of Vienna. After returning to St. Paul, she began working as an executive assistant within the office of former Gov. Orville Freeman. Friends within the governor’s office encouraged her to go to law school, and she or he enrolled in 1956 in St. Paul College of Law, now referred to as Mitchell Hamline School of Law. She was certainly one of three women enrolled at the college on the time, Mary Ellen Klas said.
On the primary 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 in any respect that she was a girl who was smarter than a lot of the men who were in the category.”
They were married in 1958 and graduated together in 1960. They’d five children; Daniel Klas died in 2017 at 90.
Through her connections from working within the governor’s office, Mary Louise Klas was invited to help as certainly one of the attorneys within the 1962 gubernatorial recount representing Gov. Karl Rolvaag.
“I used to be within the early months of pregnancy with our son once we began the trial, and ‘morning’ sickness often struck in the course of the afternoon court session,” Klas wrote in a letter to the editor published within the Pioneer Press in 2009. “Each sets of lawyers brought back from lunch their cellophane-wrapped soda crackers for me to choke down — surreptitiously, in fact.”
After the election, Rolvaag appointed her to the Youth Conservation Commission, whose goal was “to supply 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 very own joint law practice, Klas & Klas, in 1973. Mary Louise Klas also began serving as a referee in juvenile court and began focusing her private practice in family law. As she recalled, “I started to note that the family law cases were the energetic ones on my desk while the probate and other files got pushed to the credenza.”
In 1986, Gov. Rudy Perpich appointed her as the primary woman on the bench in Ramsey County District Court. She didn’t join the family court for 2 years, nonetheless, because she desired to “get her bearings in the opposite 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.”
Klas was a conscientious and arranged jurist who was known to jot down personalized thank-you notes to every juror serving in her court, even following up with one juror’s employer — McDonald’s — to make sure she would receives a commission for the additional 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 help human-rights advocates in Central and Eastern Europe draft latest 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 coach 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 make use of one’s authority and influence to deal with the insidious brutality that so many ladies face of their homes,’’ said Thomas, who traveled with Klas on lots of the trips as director of the Women’s Program on the Advocates for Human Rights. “So few powerful people do this.”
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 usually not safeguarded equally? What do now 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 can be held at 10 a.m. July 10 on the Church of St. Thomas More in St. Paul, with visitation from 3 to six p.m. July 9 at Willwerscheid Funeral Home in St. Paul.