Justice Virginia Linder, Oregon Supreme Court

During several conversations with Justice Virginia Linder, as we worked out the scheduling for our interview in preparation for this profile, I thought several times about how I might begin the article.

I had given her several previous MBA judicial profiles so that she could think about what she might want to say about herself in print; and, when I asked if there would be anything in particular that she felt people might be interested in about her, she responded, in her quiet way, “No, I really don’t think so.”

Then one morning she called to say that she would be in Portland several days later for a conference at the Oregon State Bar office and that we could get together for our interview in the afternoon following the meeting. “And I’m hoping to have time to stop at a couple of stores along Highway 217,” she said. Thinking she meant Washington Square, or maybe Powell’s or Borders, I asked her about that. “Well, there are a couple of woodworking stores where I can get tools I just can’t find in Salem,” she said.

Woodworking tools?

Justice Linder builds kayaks. I’m not sure if she’s the only justice around who does that, but she just might be. She keeps a few in her tidy garage, all of them handmade by Linder herself, all of them beautiful, and all of them used regularly. She describes finding relaxation and enjoyment in the tangible, detailed, precise work of building her kayaks; and her aptitude for detailed, precise work is apparent in her approach to her work on the Supreme Court.

It’s also true that Justice Linder has been the first person around to do lots of things, and she’s never let that slow her down.

Raised in a household of teachers, Justice Linder was born in Greeley, Colorado, and grew up in Carmichael, California, not far from Sacramento. She is known to family and friends as ‘Gini’ or ‘Gin,’ as in her toddler nephew’s question on walking into a new neighbor’s house, “Where’s your Gin?”

Her first away-from-home experience was at an art and music camp at the campus of the University of Kansas at Lawrence, after her junior year in high school. There was a certain amount of trepidation, never having been away from home alone before; but she went anyway, encouraged by her mother, and experienced her first time away from home as an opportunity to make new friends from new places, and to immerse herself in art, “for the last time in my life, probably.” By the end of the summer, she knew she would leave home after high school.

When the time came for college, Justice Linder followed a friend to Southern Oregon College (now University) in Ashland, and became an Oregon addict, attending school, working as a ski instructor during the winter months; and talking politics and civil rights with friends all year long.

Unemployed after graduation, Justice Linder’s sister and brother-in-law invited her to live with them and their baby son in Virginia, on the theory that you might as well be out of a job with us here than alone back in Oregon. ‘Aunt Gin’ became her nephew’s alternate caretaker. After two years, it was time to transition back, and Justice Linder applied to Willamette Law School. She didn’t know any lawyers, and didn’t know what it would be like to practice law, and she’d never heard of a woman being a lawyer.

A teacher of civics and American government had sparked her interest, making the court system seem vital and important and exciting; and sparking in the young Gini Linder a lasting interest in the value of the court system as a means of dispute resolution, and in the area of children’s rights. The now-adult Justice Linder describes a moment, sitting on the Court of Appeals with two colleagues, each of whom had memories of their first contact with the court system; and for each of them, that memory was of sitting in a courtroom as a young child, during the litigation of their parents’ divorce.

She found law school less than full-time enthralling, and took a part-time job clerking in the Appellate Division of the Attorney General’s Office. “I found my place in the law right then and there,” she says, recalling that the office was the kind of place where a young, green law student was allowed to tackle any project she could handle, so that by the time she was ready to graduate from law school, she had worked on perhaps as many as 50 appeals.

Justice Linder also recalls that, of the 12 lawyers in the office at that time, four were women – an unusually high percentage at that time. She remembers that her very first case was argued by then-Assistant Attorney General and now retired Court of Appeals Judge Mary Dietz – because young Gini Linder, who had prepared the case, wasn’t licensed as a lawyer yet. The other side of the case was argued by a young attorney from Medford named Rebecca Orf – now also a judge. Speaking with Justice Linder, one remarks that she always noticed, and still remembers, whether there were women lawyers, and how many.

On graduation from law school, she interviewed with Portland firms, but instead accepted a position in her beloved Appellate Division when Chris VanDyke’s decision to run for District Attorney in Marion County opened a vacancy. She stayed with the Attorney General’s Office for some 17 years, working under five Attorneys General, and serving as Oregon’s Solicitor General for more than 11 of those years. Governor John Kitzhaber appointed Judge Linder to the Court of Appeals in 1997, where she remained until her election to the Oregon Supreme Court in 2007.

Linder was elected to the Supreme Court, defeating former Labor Commissioner and Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Roberts.

She faced Roberts and Pendleton attorney Gene Hallman in the May 2006 primary, winning 39 percent of the vote to Roberts’ 42 percent. Because neither candidate won a majority of the votes, Linder and Roberts advanced to the November runoff. In that runoff, Linder defeated Roberts by 52 percent to 48 percent.

Linder is the first woman elected to the Oregon Supreme Court. All previous female justices had been appointed to fill vacancies. She is also the first openly lesbian member of a state supreme court anywhere in the nation and the first openly gay person elected as a non-incumbent to a state supreme court. Since 1998 she has been a professor at Willamette’s law school.

Justice Linder speaks often about the progress of women’s participation in the legal world in the early days and throughout her career; and she generally mentions in passing the number of women working at each level of her career. It is something she takes note of and remembers, without apparently making a point of doing so; she just seems to notice and remember.

Justice Linder has the matter-of-fact outlook and low-key, forthright courage of the pioneer that she’s been throughout her career. She loves what she does, enjoying the wide range of cases, the case load, her co-workers; as she says, “That’s about as good as it gets.”

Originally authored by Catherine Carroll and printed in the June 2005 Multnomah Lawyer.

Updated for the Internet in 2008