Super Lawyers - Colorado 2012

Q: Did the General Mills thing help?
A: No, it didn’t. It’s funny. I suspect all the
General Mills people were Republicans.
[Laughs]

Q: So how did the Mondale job come about? A: I just went in and interviewed. I mean, it was no … anything. No political connections at all. We spent most of the interview arguing about the Vietnam War. He was at that point in favor of it and I was against it. And he hired me.

Q: He liked your arguments. A: I don’t know. But I got to work on a couple of issues there that were absolutely extraordinary. The first was the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which passed because Martin Luther King was assassinated. Mondale had started out as a junior member of the housing subcommittee of the banking committee— talk about an assignment that, at that point, wasn’t very interesting—and he decided he would start working on fair housing. It went through the Senate after a filibuster—a real filibuster, when people had to stay on the floor and argue all night; and then it went through the House right after King was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson signed it into law. I don’t think that kind of legislation could pass now. But I did half of the staff work on that. The people I got to work with, and the things I got to see and do, were just amazing.

Q: Such as?

A: The little group that every day prepared for the filibuster arguments included Ted Kennedy, Jacob Javits, Chuck Percy from Illinois, [Joseph] Tydings from Maryland— there were six of them. Oh, Ed Brook from Massachusetts. So you go to sit and listen to them talk and work through things on a daily basis. I was usually the only staff member there with Mondale. At one point he told me I should pay him for my job.

The other thing I worked on for him was an
East-West trade bill. The computer industry
was getting pretty strong in Minnesota—
Control Data and 3M—and those companies
wanted to trade with Europe. But computer
equipment couldn’t be traded anywhere
outside the United States for fear that it
would go on to communist countries. The
bill I got to work on ended that ban on trade
of computers.

Q: What stands out about your tenure with Colorado Rural Legal Services? A: The case that was probably most significant involved the Hill-Burton Act, which required the hospitals that received Hill-Burton funds for construction—that’s how hospitals got built in the 1950s—were to provide free or below-cost services; and the hospital in Greeley was turning away migrant farmworkers and not providing any free or below-cost services for them. We ultimately won that case in the 10th Circuit. That became, and I think it still is, the governing law.

Q: Did you have a mentor there?
A: Not really. Legal Services tended to be
young people.
Q: What about when you became a
deputy attorney general?
A: No. [Laughs] I’ve always been pretty much
a Lone Ranger, I guess.

Q: How did the deputy AG job come about? A: You know, I never asked J.D. MacFarlane, who was the attorney general, why he decided to appoint me. But I think he saw me at the Capitol. I started representing Legal Services clients for the state Legislature. We figured that we might not get in the court some of the things we wanted, [but] if we could talk our clients into coming and testifying before a legislative committee, we could often get legislation that changed things. It was a Republican-controlled Legislature, but pretty moderate. [MacFarlane] was a former state senator, and when I met him he was the number two person at the state public defender’s office. He asked me if I’d be his deputy when he ran for attorney general. It was a pretty nice job to have and I said, “Sure.” I basically did all the hiring and firing there.

Q: Is that tough?

A: Hiring is fun; firing isn’t so much fun. I also oversaw a lot of the legal work that was done, kept track of the cases that were controversial; and if the governor or secretary of state had a legal question, I was the person from the attorney general’s office who would go over and talk with them and work through it.

The only case I did—because I wasn’t doing much court work—was one in the state Supreme Court, where I had the nice task of arguing that the voter-initiated amendment that fixed the Denver school district boundaries with the boundaries of Denver should be upheld. It was an effort to keep school integration and busing out of the suburbs. It wasn’t an issue I was particular excited about doing, but that’s what my job was.

Q: Did you win?
A: I won. But I wasn’t too happy about it.
Q: Have you ever thought about …?
A: Running for office?
Q: Exactly.

A: I’m too shy! I hate making telephone calls. And every time I volunteer to deliver pamphlets door-to-door, I can’t bring myself to do it. So my husband is perfectly happy to do things like that.