The cases

Trials of the Courthouse

For sixty-four years this was where federal law happened in Oregon. These are the cases worth knowing — a curfew challenge that reached the Supreme Court, a fight over who owns the beach, tribal water rights, a rolling pin — sorted honestly by what the record proves and where each one actually happened.

Tried in this building

Heard in the district courtrooms on the sixth and seventh floors, with Gus Solomon on the bench — or, in 1942, at the counsel tables.

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.

Read the case history ↗

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 forced the evidence to be fixed 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 ↗

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. 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 ↗

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.

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 turns the memory inside out. 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).

Before he was a judge

The case that made his name — argued while he was still a young Portland lawyer, and decided in a state court, not this one.

De Jonge v. Oregon

Citation: 299 U.S. 353 (1937)
Role: Solomon: local appeals counsel
Where: A state prosecution (Multnomah County) — not this building

Oregon convicted Dirk De Jonge under its criminal-syndicalism law for helping run a peaceful, publicly advertised meeting held under Communist Party auspices. Solomon, then a thirty-year-old Portland lawyer, saw the constitutional principle no one else had raised: he wrote the petition that got the case to the Supreme Court and the brief that argued it, reframing the whole fight around the freedom of assembly — a theory never raised in the Oregon courts — and brought in the ACLU's Osmond Fraenkel to deliver the argument. A unanimous Court agreed: “Peaceable assembly for lawful discussion cannot be made a crime.” The right of assembly now bound every state, and De Jonge walked free.

Read the decision ↗

His court, another city

A case that shows why judges elsewhere asked for him — but did not happen in this building.

The “Bird Case” — United States v. Steiner

Citation: 229 F.2d 745 (9th Cir. 1956)
Role: Solomon: trial judge, by designation
Where: U.S. District Court, Southern District of California — San Diego

A conspiracy to smuggle parrots and parakeets past U.S. customs and quarantine ended up in federal court in San Diego. Courthouse lore has Judge Solomon traveling south to hear it, with his young law clerk Jerome Kohlberg — the future architect of the buyout firm KKR — beside him. The case, its charges, and its outcome are documented; the detail that anchors it to Solomon lives in his own recollection and his clerk's, not in the published opinion, so it belongs in the record as a story he told, not a fact of this building.

Walk these cases through the rooms where they happened in Walk the Building, or read the life behind them in Judge Solomon’s biography. Citations and the honest gaps are catalogued in the project’s Sources.