Heard in the district courtrooms on the sixth and seventh floors, where the U.S. District Court for Oregon sat from September 1933 until November 1997.
United States v. Minoru Yasui
- Citation
- 48 F. Supp. 40 (D. Or. 1942); aff'd 320 U.S. 115 (1943); vacated 1984
- Role
- Solomon: amicus curiae
- Where
- A sixth-floor district courtroom — the specific room is undocumented
The first courtroom test of the wartime curfew imposed on Japanese Americans. Minoru Yasui, an Oregon-born lawyer, broke the curfew on purpose to challenge it and stood before Judge James Alger Fee, jury waived. The national ACLU had refused the case; Solomon pressed its director to take it, and when the ACLU declined he appeared as amicus on his own — the lone friend of the court to argue the curfew unconstitutional. Another amicus, arguing for it, was California's attorney general, Earl Warren. Fee ruled the curfew could not bind a citizen, then held that Yasui had forfeited his citizenship and convicted him anyway. Yasui served nine months in a six-by-eight solitary cell; the Supreme Court restored his citizenship but upheld the curfew, and the conviction stood for forty-two years. On January 16, 1984, Yasui returned to this building for a coram nobis hearing before Judge Robert Belloni, who vacated the conviction ten days later but refused to reach the government's misconduct — a result Yasui called a hollow personal victory, and appealed. He died in 1986 with the appeal unresolved. Solomon, recording his oral history in these chambers in October 1984, mentioned in passing that Yasui had come to visit him not long before.
Read the case history ↗Clark v. United States — the Vanport flood claims
- Citation
- 109 F. Supp. 213 (D. Or. 1952)
- Role
- Judge James Alger Fee presiding
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
On Memorial Day 1948 the Columbia broke through a railroad embankment and destroyed Vanport, then Oregon's second-largest city, in an afternoon. Fifteen people died and some eighteen thousand were displaced, a disproportionate number of them Black shipyard workers who had come west for war work and who found, afterward, that most of Portland would not rent to them. More than seven hundred lawsuits comprising roughly three thousand claims were filed against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act — the largest civil docket this building ever carried. In October 1952, Judge Fee ruled for the government. The plaintiffs recovered nothing.
Read the opinion ↗United States v. Wollam and others — the “Portland Four”
- Citation
- conviction 1954; rev'd, Wollam v. United States, 244 F.2d 212 (9th Cir. 1957)
- Role
- Federal prosecution for contempt of Congress
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland) — the trial judge is not established in the sources we have
The House Un-American Activities Committee came to Portland in June 1954 and heard three informers name fifty-three Oregonians, nearly half of them connected to Reed College. Professor Stanley Moore was fired; Lloyd Reynolds was suspended. Four World War II veterans — John MacKenzie, Herbert Simpson, Don Wollam and Thomas Moore — refused to answer and were prosecuted for contempt of Congress in Portland's federal court. Three were sentenced to prison. The Ninth Circuit reversed the convictions in 1957, after the Supreme Court had begun cutting back the committee's contempt power. Oregon, notably, never hosted a Smith Act prosecution.
United States v. Elkins
- Citation
- conviction c. 1958; rev'd, Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206 (1960)
- Role
- Prosecuted by U.S. Attorney C. Edward Luckey
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
James B. “Big Jim” Elkins ran vice in Portland, and the tapes he made became the evidence for the Oregonian's 1956 exposés, a Pulitzer Prize, and the McClellan Committee's national investigation of the Teamsters. Elkins was then tried in this building for the wiretapping itself, on evidence state officers had seized under a warrant that would have been invalid in federal court. The Supreme Court reversed in 1960 and abolished the “silver platter” doctrine — the rule that had let federal prosecutors use evidence unlawfully gathered by state police, so long as no federal officer did the gathering. It is among the most consequential Fourth Amendment decisions ever to begin in this courthouse. According to the court's own historical society, Robert F. Kennedy appeared as a witness at the trial, and his performance on the stand was remembered against him when he ran in Oregon's 1968 presidential primary.
Read the decision ↗United States v. Herbert Erickson
- Citation
- conviction 1968; vacated, Erickson v. United States, 757 F. Supp. 2d 1060 (D. Or. 2010)
- Role
- Solomon: trial judge
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
A Vietnam-era draft case that turned on conscience. Herbert Erickson refused induction on moral rather than religious grounds — a claim the law did not yet recognize. Solomon pressed him on whether he would use force to defend his own home; when Erickson said he would, Solomon convicted him. But true to his reputation, he imposed no prison — only probation and community service. The law caught up in 1970, and forty-two years later another judge of this court vacated the conviction, because a defense unavailable in 1968 would have applied.
Sohappy v. Smith / United States v. Oregon
- Citation
- 302 F. Supp. 899 (D. Or. 1969)
- Role
- Judge Robert C. Belloni presiding
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
Fourteen Yakama fishermen led by David Sohappy sued the State of Oregon over its regulation of Columbia River fishing. On July 8, 1969, Judge Belloni held that the treaties of 1855 guaranteed the tribes more than the same access other citizens had: the state was required to ensure them a “fair share” of the harvest. The ruling laid the foundation for Judge Boldt's decision in Washington five years later and opened a case, United States v. Oregon, that remains under the court's supervision more than half a century on — one of the longest-running pieces of litigation in American history.
Read the opinion ↗United States v. Cheryl Dawn James
- Citation
- U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, No. 71-1919 (1972)
- Role
- Solomon: sentencing judge
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
The case where the record turns against the judge — and the reason this site sets his memory beside the scholarship rather than choosing one. In January 1971, more than a dozen FBI agents forced their way into a Portland home to seize a young Navy deserter. In the struggle, his seventeen-year-old sister, Cheryl James — a Jefferson High honor student with no record — hit an agent with a rolling pin to free her fourteen-year-old brother from a chokehold. For that she was tried without a jury and sent to an adult federal prison.
As Solomon told it
Solomon told the story as a mercy. He had set the eighteen-month term to begin only after Cheryl finished high school, so she could walk the stage at Jefferson first. And he recalled facing down the defendant herself, who chased him to an elevator after a speech, shrieking, until he silenced her: “Do you want to go to jail, now?”
As the record shows it
The record undoes the memory. The woman at the elevator was not Cheryl James — it was the activist Fern Parker, and police reports prove it; the judge could not recognize the teenager he had sentenced. James was denied a jury (a Ninth Circuit judge, dissenting, called that unconstitutional), branded a liar from the bench, and her appeal declared “frivolous.” She was raped in prison, bore a son, and was freed on time served only after a biracial coalition and a dogged lawyer forced the issue.
Solomon's account is preserved in Harry Stein's biography; the correcting record is Jane Cigarran, “The Case of Cheryl D. James,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 121, no. 1 (Spring 2020).
Hay v. Bruno
- Citation
- 344 F. Supp. 286 (D. Or. 1972)
- Role
- Solomon: wrote the opinion (three-judge court)
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
The constitutional sequel to Oregon's famous beach fight. When the Hays fenced off the dry sand in front of their Cannon Beach motel, the state ordered the fence down under the 1967 Beach Law; the Hays sued, claiming the state had taken their property. Writing for a three-judge court, Solomon rejected them: Oregon had claimed these sands for eighty years and the public had used them since 1892, so nothing had been suddenly taken. The fence came down, and Oregon's beaches stayed open to everyone.
Read the opinion ↗United States v. Loud Hawk
- Citation
- 474 U.S. 302 (1986); dismissed on remand, charges dropped 1988
- Role
- Prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Charles H. Turner; tried before Judges Belloni and Redden
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
In November 1975 an Oregon state trooper stopped two vehicles near Ontario carrying members of the American Indian Movement, then fugitives after Wounded Knee. Dennis Banks escaped on foot; Kenneth Loud Hawk, Russell Redner, KaMook Banks and Anna Mae Aquash were arrested, and officers reported 350 pounds of dynamite. A Portland grand jury indicted them that month, and the prosecution then ground on in this building for thirteen years — through suppression of the dynamite evidence, a dismissal for want of a speedy trial, a Supreme Court reversal in 1986, and a final abandonment of the charges in 1988. The court's own historical society remembers Marlon Brando's motor home entering the record and Bill Walton sitting in the gallery. The prosecutor, Turner, once had to pass through a corridor of AIM supporters after arguing the appeal.
Read the Supreme Court decision ↗United States v. Adair
- Citation
- 478 F. Supp. 336 (D. Or. 1979); aff'd 723 F.2d 1394 (9th Cir. 1983)
- Role
- Solomon: trial judge
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
A foundational case on tribal water. When Congress “terminated” the Klamath in 1954 and sold off the reservation, did the tribe's treaty right to water vanish too? Solomon said no. Reading the 1864 treaty in the tribe's favor, he held that the right to hunt and fish would be worthless without water to sustain the fish and game — so the Klamath still held a reserved water right, senior to every rancher and to the State of Oregon itself, dated to “time immemorial.” The Ninth Circuit affirmed the heart of it.
Read the opinion ↗Weyerhaeuser Co. v. Combustion Equipment Associates
- Citation
- 654 F.2d 569 (9th Cir. 1981)
- Role
- Solomon: trial judge
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon
Solomon's showpiece of trial management. Weyerhaeuser sued over a steam plant, meant to burn sawmill waste into energy, that never worked. It was the kind of document-buried commercial case that swallows a courtroom for months — Solomon estimated six weeks anywhere else. Instead he made the parties fix the evidence in advance, in a single 173-page pretrial order, folding in twenty-six depositions and seventy-one written witness statements, and tried the whole thing without a jury in about two and a half days. The Ninth Circuit affirmed his “exhaustive and comprehensive findings.” Around the federal courts they called him the Fastest Gavel in the West.
Read the opinion ↗The Rajneeshee prosecutions
- Citation
- United States v. Sheela Silverman (D. Or. 1986); United States v. Croft and Hagan (D. Or. 1995)
- Role
- Prosecuted by U.S. Attorney Charles H. Turner; Judge Malcolm Marsh presiding in 1995
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
The collapse of Rancho Rajneesh produced a decade of federal proceedings in this building. A grand jury opened the immigration-fraud investigation in January 1985; a thirty-five count indictment followed that October, charging what prosecutors called the largest marriage-fraud scheme on record. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh pleaded guilty here on November 14, 1985, paid a $400,000 penalty and left the country the same night. Five disciples pleaded guilty in December. In July 1986, Ma Anand Sheela and Ma Anand Puja pleaded guilty to wiretapping and to the product tampering behind the Dalles salad-bar poisonings — the largest bioterror attack in American history. And in July 1995, two years before the court left the building, Sally-Anne Croft and Susan Hagan were extradited from Britain, tried before Judge Marsh, and convicted of conspiring to murder the United States Attorney who had brought all of it.
Read the 1986 opinion ↗Portland Audubon Society v. Lujan
- Citation
- 784 F. Supp. 786 (D. Or. 1992)
- Role
- Judge Helen J. Frye presiding
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
The Timber Wars reached this building through Judge Frye's courtroom. Holding that the Bureau of Land Management had ignored new evidence about the northern spotted owl, she enjoined old-growth timber sales across western Oregon — an order that helped shut down federal logging in the Northwest and set off the political crisis that produced the Northwest Forest Plan. It remains one of the most economically consequential injunctions ever issued from an Oregon federal court.
Read the opinion ↗Bonnichsen v. United States — the Kennewick Man case
- Citation
- filed October 16, 1996 (D. Or.)
- Role
- Magistrate Judge John Jelderks presiding
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
When a 9,000-year-old skeleton washed out of the bank of the Columbia at Kennewick in the summer of 1996, eight anthropologists sued to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from repatriating it to the tribes who claimed it as an ancestor. The suit was filed in Portland in October 1996, and its opening rulings were made in this building before the court moved. The litigation ran for another eight years and reshaped how the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is read; the remains were finally returned for burial in 2017.
Read the case history ↗The last trials — Leatherman Tool Group v. Cooper Industries and Greene v. Manufacturers' Life
- Citation
- Leatherman verdict October 17, 1997; aff'd in part, Cooper Industries v. Leatherman Tool Group, 532 U.S. 424 (2001)
- Role
- Judge Malcolm F. Marsh; Magistrate Judge Janice M. Stewart
- Where
- U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland)
The building's last jury trial before a district judge was a fight between two toolmakers. Leatherman sued Cooper Industries over a knock-off multi-tool, and on October 17, 1997 a jury returned $50,000 in compensatory damages and $4.5 million in punitive damages, most of it directed by statute to Oregon's crime-victims fund. The Supreme Court took the case in 2001 and used it to hold that punitive awards must be reviewed afresh on appeal — so the last celebrated verdict returned in this courthouse went on to change American damages law. The court's historical society later issued a correction: the true final trial in the building was Greene v. Manufacturers' Life, heard October 21–24, 1997 before Magistrate Judge Stewart. Judge Marsh's valedictory for the place was shorter: “A last sad refrain — leaving a place where you've been and moving on to a bright beginning.”
Read the Supreme Court decision ↗