From school segregation to voting rights, a baker’s dozen of decisions reveals the range of Natalie Hudson’s work on Minnesota’s highest courts.
By Marshall H. Tanick & Cathy Gorlin
Chief Justice Natalie Hudson is retiring from the Minnesota Supreme Court at the end of September, following a 44-year legal career after graduating from the University of Minnesota Law School. Her career included stints in legal aid, private practice, academic administration at Hamline University School of Law, the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, followed by service on the Minnesota Court of Appeals and the pinnacle of her career, a position on the Minnesota Supreme Court, including the past three years as chief justice.
During that last period, she oversaw administration of the state judicial system, taking over from her predecessor of 13 years, Lorie Gildea, who is now in private practice in Minneapolis with the Miami-based law firm Greenberg Traurig. Gildea left the Minnesota judiciary in good shape after several tumultuous years encompassing civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd, the allowance of audio and visual recording of court proceedings on a limited basis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, to boot.
Despite her admirable accomplishments, Justice Hudson has not been a woman of “firsts” across the board. She has jokingly mentioned that she is often confused with another pioneering Black woman jurist who served on the state Supreme Court before her, Wilhelmina Wright, and vice versa. Wright later was appointed to the federal bench in Minnesota. The comparison evokes the identical cousins in the 1960s television sitcom “The Patty Duke Show.” Nor was Hudson the first woman to serve as chief justice, following in the footsteps of Kathleen Blatz and her immediate predecessor, Gildea. She was, however, Minnesota’s first Black chief justice.
She is now being succeeded by another woman, Theodora Gaïtas, elevated after serving on the Minnesota Court of Appeals and spending the past two years as an associate justice on the state Supreme Court. She assumes the chief justice position on October 1, appointed by Governor Tim Walz.
Walz also appointed Reynaldo Aligada Jr., brought up from the Ramsey County District Court to take the associate justice spot vacated by Gaïtas. With Aligada’s arrival, five of the court’s seven members will have received their initial Supreme Court appointments from Walz. As of May, Walz had appointed 158 sitting judges across the state judiciary, nearly 50% of the bench. Well more than half of his appointees have been women, jurists of color or members of other ethnic and gender minority groups.
Justice Hudson exits a few months before her 70th birthday next January and the mandatory judicial retirement age of 70, still vibrant, in good health and eager to take on more challenges in the law and elsewhere.
While her rulings affected the entire state, a number of them had particular impact here in Minneapolis, her hometown of St. Paul and the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Her retirement provides an opportune occasion to review, fittingly, a baker’s dozen—13—of them, applying and interpreting the law and occasionally reacting to how her colleagues did so.
Signature Saga
The signature saga of her tenure on the state high court is the case of Cruz-Guzman v. State, which has been going on for more than a decade and is still lodged within the judicial system.
The litigation is a class-action lawsuit brought in 2015 by parents challenging racial and socioeconomic segregation and low academic achievement in Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools. The litigation sought remedies to segregation that separated those students from more affluent, largely white schools and districts. The claimants deemed relief necessary to satisfy the state constitutional requirement in Article XIII, Section 1, for a “general and uniform system of public schools” that is “thorough and efficient.” A settlement was almost worked out a number of years ago, but it faltered in the Legislature and was not ultimately approved by the solons.
Halted for a while, the litigation turned into a version of the 1993 Bill Murray–Andie MacDowell movie “Groundhog Day” as it went up and down the judicial ladder. The Hennepin County District Court allowed the central constitutional claims to proceed, but the appellate court ruled that they presented a political question beyond judicial review. The case reached Justice Hudson and her colleagues on the Supreme Court in 2018, when she wrote for a 4–2 majority that the claims were actionable and could proceed.
Writing for the four-member majority, Justice Hudson rejected the appellate court’s premise that judicial intervention would violate the separation-of-powers doctrine by intruding on legislative prerogatives or deciding a “political question” beyond judicial authority.
Noting the “appalling” academic disparities alleged in the complaint, she held that separation-of-powers principles do not divest courts of the responsibility to decide whether the Legislature has failed in its constitutional duties under the Education Clause and the related Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses. She found a firm foundation for judicial review and returned the case for further proceedings.
But the case re-emerged on the Supreme Court docket in 2023, addressing whether racial imbalances alone establish an Education Clause violation and what causation the claimants must prove. By a 5–1 majority, the court held that the parents did not have to prove that state action caused the imbalances. They did, however, have to show that the imbalances were a “substantial factor” in causing an inadequate education.
But the chief justice was not convinced. In dissent, she opined:
“I would hold that a system of de facto segregated schools is an inadequate education.”
Period! Lamenting that communities of color had watched their children languish in traditional public schools, she concluded that the state had failed to provide the constitutionally required general, uniform, thorough and efficient system of public education.
The case was returned for the second time to the Hennepin County District Court, where it remains pending for trial as it meanders through its second decade. If it reaches the state Supreme Court again, it will no longer have Chief Justice Hudson there to roll out the welcome mat.
Transgender Topic
Another discrimination topic—transgender rights under the Minnesota Human Rights Act—also has been addressed by Chief Justice Hudson. Writing for a unanimous court last year in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting, she held that excluding a transgender woman from the women’s division of powerlifting competitions violated the Act’s public-accommodations provision.
The version of the statute governing the case protected transgender individuals through its definition of sexual orientation. As the chief justice wrote, the sponsoring organization’s policy prohibiting transgender women from competing in the women’s division constituted “direct evidence of discrimination based on sexual orientation.” The court returned the separate business-discrimination claim for further proceedings concerning the organization’s asserted legitimate business purpose.
The decision departed from the approach of the court’s ruling 24 years earlier in Goins v. West Group, in which the tribunal, before Justice Hudson joined it, held that an employer’s restroom policy based on biological sex did not violate the Act’s sexual-orientation protections. In Cooper, the court limited Goins to the employment context.
The powerlifter’s claim was subsequently resolved this spring in a settlement providing a payment to Cooper and her attorneys, with the amount undisclosed. The litigation broadened the application of the Human Rights Act’s protections for the transgender community.
Criminal Cases
Criminal cases take up an important segment of the high court’s work, particularly because appeals from first-degree murder convictions are among the matters that go directly to that tribunal, along with workers’ compensation appeals and certain election disputes. The court has discretion in deciding which other cases to hear. According to the Minnesota Judicial Branch, it considers more than 600 petitions annually and accepts review in about 10% to 14% of cases from the Court of Appeals.
Earlier this year, the chief justice dissented in the high-profile spousal murder case of State v. Firkus, which involved the fatal shooting of a St. Paul woman in her home in 2010, followed by prosecution of her husband more than a decade later.
Emulating “The Fugitive” television series and Harrison Ford movie, another 1993 hit, the husband attributed the killing to an intruder. He maintained that his shotgun discharged during a struggle with the intruder. But a Ramsey County jury disbelieved him and convicted him of first-degree murder. The state Supreme Court upheld that determination, with Hudson the lone justice who would have reversed the conviction.
The chief justice felt that the substantial circumstantial evidence presented by the prosecution did not exclude all reasonable inferences “except that of guilt.” The court’s treatment of the evidence, she wrote, “does nothing to guard against wrongful convictions.”
In another criminal case arising in Anoka County, she wrote for the court in 2018 in State v. Henderson, holding that a front-seat passenger who grabbed the steering wheel of a moving vehicle could be held criminally liable for operating it.
The lack of a statutory definition of “operating” was addressed through her plain-language analysis: “operating means any act that causes a motor vehicle to function or controls the functioning of the vehicle.” That definition, she wrote, was broad enough to include a passenger who grabs the wheel and steers a moving car. His location outside the driver’s seat did not remove his conduct from the statute.
Standing Suit
The issue of standing, or lack thereof, which has increasingly been subject to adjudication at the U.S. Supreme Court and its Minnesota counterpart, came before Justice Hudson and her colleagues in the 2024 case of Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Hunt.
The case challenged the 2023 Minnesota re-enfranchisement statute that restored voting rights to people convicted of felony-level offenses when they were no longer incarcerated for those offenses. A conservative advocacy group and three individual taxpayers challenged the measure, arguing that Article VII, Section 1, of the state constitution bars voting by a person convicted of a felony unless “restored to civil rights.” They contended that restoring the right to vote alone did not satisfy that requirement.
Alleging no personal injury, the challengers relied on “taxpayer standing,” based on public expenditures associated with implementing the statute. But the Supreme Court, affirming an Anoka County District Court ruling, held that the claimants lacked standing because the challenged expenditures were incidental to the substantive voting-rights provision.
Written during her first year as chief justice, Hudson’s opinion departed from longstanding language in prior cases allowing taxpayers to challenge illegal actions by public officials, not just illegal spending. She imposed a limiting principle: taxpayers cannot manufacture standing simply by pointing to incidental spending connected to implementing a measure.
Instead, allegedly unlawful disbursement of public funds must be central to the dispute. Otherwise, virtually any challenge to government action could become a taxpayer lawsuit. The chief justice upheld dismissal without deciding the statute’s constitutionality.
In an earlier case concerning voting-rights restoration, she wrote a blistering dissent in the 2023 case of Schroeder v. Simon. The majority upheld the then-existing law withholding restoration of voting rights until discharge from a felony sentence, including probation or supervised release.
The challenge concerned both the state constitution’s voting provision and the restoration statute. The majority concluded that the constitution permitted the Legislature to restore voting rights before completion of a sentence but did not require it to do so.
The majority also rejected an equal-protection challenge based on the law’s disparate racial impact. In dissent, Hudson, then an associate justice, regarded the ruling as a departure from the state’s highly protective approach to racial-discrimination claims. She wrote that it “demeans our constitution’s promise of equal protection” and “sanctions the racial discrimination inexorably woven into the statute.”
The Legislature changed the law shortly afterward.
In another case rejecting standing, the chief justice wrote a 49-page opinion earlier this year in In the Matter of the Welfare of the Children of L.K.. The decision barred two white foster parents in Fairmont from pursuing their constitutional challenge to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and the Minnesota Indian Family Preservation Act in the children’s protection proceedings.
The foster folks, who had cared for more than 30 children, sought to challenge the removal of young Native American twins from their home and their placement with an Indigenous relative under the laws’ placement preferences.
But the chief justice declined to reach the constitutional merits because the foster parents had not become parties to the child-protection case, which involved the children’s natural mother and placement with a maternal aunt.
The foster parents have taken their constitutional challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court in Reyelts v. Ellison, which has yet to announce whether it will take up the case.
The challengers face the obstacle of the high court’s 2023 ruling in Haaland v. Brackeen, which upheld Congress’s authority to enact ICWA to protect tribal interests and keep Native American children connected with their families and communities. That decision, however, did not resolve the equal-protection challenge to the placement preferences; the court found the challengers lacked standing to pursue it.
Defamation Decision
Distinguishing prior Minnesota case law, Justice Hudson wrote the court’s decision in the 2019 case of McGuire v. Bowlin, holding that a public high school basketball coach was not a “public official” for purposes of the heightened actual-malice standard.
The landmark 1964 decision in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and its progeny require public officials and public figures pursuing defamation claims to establish knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth by clear and convincing evidence.
The defendant was one of a group of parents who complained about the coach of the Woodbury High School girls’ basketball team, apparently feeling that he was no Gene Hackman in the classic 1986 high school basketball movie “Hoosiers.” The defense relied on the 1995 Minnesota appellate ruling in Elstrom v. Independent School District No. 270, which treated a Hopkins high school teacher as a public official and rejected her defamation claim concerning the district’s response to classroom remarks.
But Justice Hudson reasoned that a high school basketball coach does not perform the core governmental functions associated with classroom teaching. Basketball, unlike education itself, is not fundamental to democracy. The coach therefore could pursue his claim against Bowlin without overcoming the New York Times actual-malice standard.
The case ultimately was settled, following a bankruptcy proceeding by the defendant mother, for a modest amount, substantially less than the substantial legal fees incurred by the parties.
Both-Sided Brouhaha
Taking a page from Judy Collins’ hit recording of “Both Sides Now”—“I’ve looked at life from both sides now”—Justice Hudson took both sides in a medical malpractice case. She wrote the portion of the decision favoring a claim concerning the patient, then dissented from the portion barring recovery for his family members. This odd juxtaposition occurred in the 2022 case of Smits v. Park Nicollet Health Services.
The wrongful-death lawsuit arose after an outpatient fatally shot his wife and three children before committing suicide. The trustee alleged that negligent treatment of his severe depression and anxiety precipitated the deaths.
Hudson wrote the portion holding that the clinic owed its patient a duty of reasonable care, allowing the claim concerning his death to proceed. Justice G. Barry Anderson wrote the portion holding that the harm to the wife and children was unforeseeable as a matter of law, leaving the facility off the hook for those deaths.
Hudson emphasized that the absence of control over an outpatient did not negate the provider’s duty to deliver treatment meeting the standard of care. She dissented from the disposition of the family members’ claims, believing that foreseeability should not have been resolved against them as a matter of law.
Different Dissent
Justice Hudson’s partial dissent in that malpractice case was not the only time she differed from her colleagues.
In another Anoka County criminal case, State v. Vagle, she dissented from the determination that possession of the particular unserialized firearm at issue—a so-called “ghost gun”—did not violate the state’s serial-number statute.
The majority ruled that the statute applied only when federal law required a serial number, which it did not for this firearm. But, like Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, Justice Hudson, joined by Justice Karl Procaccini, got no “satisfaction” from that decision. She reasoned that the statute’s plain text applied to all firearms, regardless of federal requirements.
In one of her final rulings before retiring, she rejected a recount demand by Mike Lindell after he lost the Republican gubernatorial primary in August by approximately 11 percentage points. In Lindell v. Simon, she signed the court’s order rejecting his demand to broaden a candidate-funded recount to include tallies for all candidates in both parties’ gubernatorial primaries.
Lindell sought the broader count to investigate alleged ballot-counting anomalies. The court held that the secretary of state’s proposed procedures complied with the law and that Lindell’s claim “fails on the merits.”
Appellate Actions
Justice Hudson’s prior time on the appellate court, from 2002 to 2015, also yielded notable opinions.
In a Dakota County case in 2014, Zirnhelt v. Carter, she wrote for a three-judge panel that the damages cap for conciliation court—the real-world counterpart of the “Judge Judy” show—could be exceeded when a losing party removed the case to district court for a new trial.
The automobile-collision case had yielded the claimant the $10,000 maximum applicable to his conciliation-court claim. After removal to district court, he sought more than $30,000. Hudson held that the increase was permissible because “the district court is not limited by the jurisdictional amount of conciliation court in awarding damages.”
Another appellate case in which Hudson wrote for the panel involved expungement of criminal convictions in the 2013 case of State v. A.S.E.. She held that the district court exceeded its inherent authority by ordering executive-branch records expunged. No abuse of discretion by executive officials in maintaining the records had been alleged.
The opinion separately addressed records held by the judicial branch, which courts have inherent authority to expunge in appropriate circumstances. The district court had used a balancing standard weighing the petitioner’s benefit against the disadvantages to the public and the burdens of expungement, but failed to make the specific findings necessary to support its conclusion.
While recognizing the informality of expungement proceedings, Hudson explained that the appellate court could not meaningfully review the decision without those findings. The court reversed the orders and remanded for findings concerning the judicial-branch records.
These decisions by the retiring chief justice reflect the diversity of the cases that came before her during her tenure on the appellate courts and the eclectic nature of her work on the bench.
As she leaves the bench, she pledges to continue her involvement in public service because, to borrow from the great legal sage—and baseball icon—Yogi Berra: “It’s not over ’til it’s over.” And, for Chief Justice Hudson, it’s not.
Marshall H. Tanick is a Twin Cities Constitutional law and employment law attorney and historian. Cathy Gorlin is a Twin Cities family law attorney with the law firm of Best & Flanagan, LLP. Ben Forsberg, a student law clerk with that law firm, assisted in this article.
