{"id":1073,"date":"2014-03-07T09:40:41","date_gmt":"2014-03-07T16:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2014-03-08T17:02:26","modified_gmt":"2014-03-09T00:02:26","slug":"judge-shanstrom-a-life-well-lived-in-and-out-of-the-courtroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/03\/judge-shanstrom-a-life-well-lived-in-and-out-of-the-courtroom\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge Shanstrom: A life well lived, in and out of the courtroom"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Judge<\/a>

<\/p>

Jack Shanstrom<\/p><\/div>\n

General back-country elk rifle season opened Sept. 15 last fall in Montana,\u00a0the same day Senior U.S. District Court Judge Jack Shanstrom worked as a judge for the last time. If you don’t know where he’d rather have been \u2014 then you don’t know Jack<\/i>. On that day, we called Jack Shanstrom “Judge” because we had to. On Sept. 16, we started calling him “Judge” because we wanted to.<\/p>\n

One day years ago, Shanstrom’s predecessor’s predecessor, Judge William Jameson, turned to his wife and said, “Mildred, I love the law.”\u00a0 Aaron Small chronicles this event in his wonderful biography, \u201cJourney with the Law: The Life of Judge William J. Jameson.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shanstrom likes <\/i>the law.\u00a0 He respects the law. But he does not love <\/i>the law.\u00a0 He saves his love for his wife, Audrey, his two children and his grandchildren. Any left he rations among his friends \u2014 friends who might assemble in his basement for a poker game and who by the weekend might be installing a furnace or find themselves being chauffeured between appearances on \u201cFace the Nation\u201d and \u201cMeet the Press.\u201d Friends like Bobby G., the best sheet metal man in Montana, or former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.<\/p>\n

To say Shanstrom “liked” not “loved” the law is not to suggest that his passion for his craft was any less than Jameson\u2019s. He kept the law in perspective.<\/p>\n

Shanstrom broke some ground in the law.\u00a0 He graduated from law school in 1957 and immediately signed up for the Judge Advocates General\u2019s Corps.\u00a0 In 1960, he filed for the county attorney’s position in Park County, and won.\u00a0 In his first case, he prosecuted the chief of police \u2014 for burglary. Next, he prosecuted a highway patrolman \u2014 also for burglary.<\/p>\n

But a part-time prosecutor cannot stamp out all crime or please all the locals.\u00a0 The women on Livingston\u2019s B Street, having practiced the world\u2019s most senior calling for decades, remained employed.\u00a0 Occasionally, a good citizen would sidle into Shanstrom\u2019s office demanding that he cleanse the town of its ignoble industry. To each he had a canned response: \u201cPlease fill out this form with all the firsthand knowledge of this operation you can attest to. I will get right after it.\u201d\u00a0 No one admitted firsthand knowledge. The world did not end.<\/p>\n

Shanstrom was a prosecutor for four years before Gov. Tim Babcock appointed him to replace a Park County district judge who died in office. That was how Jack Shanstrom became Judge Shanstrom at the age of 30.<\/p>\n

As judge, Shanstrom continued to break ground \u2014 or tried to.\u00a0 In one case, his efforts to expand the contours of insurance “bad faith” were beat back by the Supreme Court.\u00a0 It was not until 2000 that the decision was overturned.<\/p>\n

Today, we are accustomed to a 50-50 division of property when long-married couples divorce. We can trace the origins of this tradition, in part, to the work of Shanstrom. When he sat in for an absent justice on the Montana Supreme Court, he affirmed an uncommonly generous 50-50 award of the marital estate to the wife in the case.

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n

That decision was used as precedent the next year to sustain a 50-50 division of property in another divorce case. It proved to be an important step in the progress of recognizing the contributions of a homemaker toward accumulating a marital estate.\u00a0 In that case, the Supreme Court affirmed the district judge\u2019s 50-50 division.\u00a0 The district judge whose decree was affirmed was Shanstrom.\u00a0 Thus, Shanstrom created the precedent to affirm himself.<\/p>\n

We don’t know why Shanstrom broke ground for the homemakers, but we could speculate.\u00a0 He watched his mom as a camp cook in Silver Gate while growing up.\u00a0 He knew what a mom’s hard work contributed to the household \u2014 knew it very well. What his mom did not teach him, Audrey did.<\/p>\n

His 18 years on the state court bench necessarily gave him an appreciation for the law, and more importantly its limits.\u00a0 It also allowed him to run a 110-trap line from Gardiner to Livingston; with Audrey, raise two children; and fish the Yellowstone River before the world watched or even read \u201cA River Runs Through It.\u201d\u00a0 He hunted each fall in the far reaches of the Rockies, filling his elk tag with a bull yearly.\u00a0 His rich life away from the law gave him a better perspective of the law.<\/p>\n

In 1982, Shanstrom moved from Livingston to Billings and became a U.S. magistrate judge.\u00a0 Here is where his mark and legacy on the law was made, and it will endure.\u00a0 He became a mediator.\u00a0 We know what mediation is because Shanstrom taught us, or taught the people who taught us.<\/p>\n

Shanstrom soon cleaned up the local federal docket and then started getting calls from the Ninth Circuit and traveling to settle cases all over the West Coast. Because he liked the law, not loved it, he had no romantic illusion about how the law could bring great and noble justice.\u00a0 He knew it could be messy, and the court is a place to be avoided.\u00a0 Besides knowing the limitations of what the law could do, he knew of the limitless life one could lead if unburdened by a lawsuit.<\/p>\n

There is no metric to judge Shanstrom\u2019s contribution as a mediator. We do know that he mediated more than 1,000 cases.\u00a0 We also know that each of these mediations saved the litigants, on average, figured conservatively, $25,000 in attorneys\u2019 fees and costs. Thus, at a minimum, $25 million was saved by his efforts. This rudimentary math ignores the angst and grieving avoided.\u00a0 Multiply this 100-fold by the progeny of mediators and mediations that have ensued and we have billions in savings for citizens both directly and indirectly through their taxes. A remarkable legacy.<\/p>\n

In 1990, President Bush made Shanstrom an Article III judge.\u00a0 The “magistrate” was dropped and he succeeded Judge James Battin to the federal bench. One ruling many remember was “NOBODY MOVE!”\u00a0 During a six-week trial of numerous drug defendants, the lights went out and the backup power failed to start. The courtroom was completely dark. The judge\u2019s order was faithfully followed until the generators kicked in.<\/p>\n

He was the chief judge for many years, assuming senior status in 2001. His last day was spent in the Bighorn Courtroom in the new federal courthouse.\u00a0 He named the courtroom himself \u2014 kind of.\u00a0 He was told he could name his own courtroom, so he did.\u00a0 He wanted it to be called the Winchester courtroom. Shanstrom collected Winchesters.\u00a0 He also collected grimaces because they told him “no.”<\/p>\n

For those who have never pulled back the hammer on a Winchester while a bugling elk slid into view, steam billowing from its nostrils on opening day, I cannot explain it.\u00a0 Either you\u2019ve done it, or you haven’t. Shanstrom did not even try to explain to those who overruled the Winchester name the depth and breadth of the western hunting life.\u00a0 He knew it would be folly.\u00a0 Thus, Bighorn it is.<\/p>\n

Shanstrom is best known, and most widely respected, for his “friends in high places.\u201d\u00a0 He has, by the power of his personal grace alone, made the speaker list at the University of Montana’s Jones-Tamm lecture series the envy of Ivy League schools.\u00a0 Chief Justice John Roberts, Attorney General Eric Holder and Justice Antonin Scalia have been a few of the recent ones.<\/p>\n

Ask Shanstrom how his fishing guest list became the A list’s A list, and he will tell you, “I had a boat and I knew Justice Byron \u2018Whizzer\u2019 White.”\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 My guess is that every Supreme Court justice knows dozens of people with dozens of boats.\u00a0 My guess is that these boats are a lot nicer than Shanstrom\u2019s float boat.<\/p>\n

But when a Supreme Court justice is in Shanstrom\u2019s boat they are fishing.\u00a0 The law is left at home.\u00a0 The chatter is from the mother goose hissing away the human intruder and the beaver tail slapping the water.\u00a0 Human conversation is confined to hatches, hearth and home.<\/p>\n

We talk about the things we love, not the things we merely like. It is Shanstrom’s ability to keep the law in balance that makes him a close friend to so many people in such high places.\u00a0 Plus, Jack does not \u201ckibitz and tell.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Jack wants to give a damn boat the credit, well, we’ll humor him.<\/p>\n

Mark Parker is a Billings attorney and president-elect of the State Bar of Montana. This article was adapted from his piece that appeared in the September 2013 issue of Montana Lawyer, published by the state bar.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

General back-country elk rifle season opened Sept. 15 last fall in Montana,\u00a0the same day Senior U.S. District Court Judge Jack Shanstrom worked as a judge for the last time. If you don’t know where he’d rather have been \u2014 then you don’t know Jack. On that day, we called Jack Shanstrom “Judge” because we had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1074,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[235,238,233,239,237,234,236],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-aaron-small","tag-eric-holder","tag-jack-shanstrom","tag-john-roberts","tag-sandra-day-oconnor","tag-tim-babcock","tag-william-jameson","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}