Minnesota’s Chief Judge, A Veteran In Conservative Legal Circles, Takes On Ice

When Patrick Schiltz became chief of the federal district court in Minnesota, his plan was to be nearly invisible, a hidden guiding hand for a low-key courthouse.

"My hope is to be the Benjamin Harrison of chief judges: one that no one remembers," he told his hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in 2022.

Four years later, the mild-mannered George W. Bush appointee — known for his conservative jurisprudence, his clerkship with late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his mentorship of future Justice Amy Coney Barrett — has been thrust into an increasingly pitched legal confrontation with President Donald Trump’s immigration forces.

It’s a role that will be remembered.

Schiltz, 65, has publicly aired his fury over the Trump administration’s mistreatment of noncitizens arrested in Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities. He blasted the Justice Department for its criticism of his courthouse colleagues and labeled as “frivolous” the administration’s effort to compel him to issue an arrest warrant for former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others involved in last week’s church protest in St. Paul.

The clash is slated to reach a climax Friday, when Schiltz plans to haul into his Minneapolis courtroom Todd Lyons, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to grill him about the rampant violation of court orders that Schiltz and his colleagues say has poisoned the trust between the administration and the court.

It’s only fitting, then, that Schiltz — a quintessential son of Minnesota who once wrote the literal chapter and verse on how to live a happy, balanced life as a lawyer — has long harbored a passion for professional wrestling.

Schiltz is perhaps an unlikely figure to emerge as the latest hero to the anti-Trump resistance. The Harvard Law School grad carved his professional identity in traditional conservative circles. He advocated for the appointment of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, took up conservative causes during his stint in private practice and clerked for Scalia twice — once on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and again at the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him unanimously to the bench in 2006.

“He comes from a traditionally conservative point of view, but he’s a rule of law guy,” said former federal prosecutor Mark Osler, now a law professor at the University of St. Thomas. “He’s been regarded as a rock-solid, generally-conservative judge on the bench, but with that comes things other than loyalty to the administration.”

As a newly minted lawyer, Schiltz lamented ideological orthodoxy among elite law students and described the faculty of those schools as “overwhelmingly leftist.” But his own early political leanings were somewhat murky. He worked as an intern and paid staffer for Sen. David Durenberger (R-Minn.), but also served as a delegate at Democratic Farmer-Labor Party conventions.

After law school and his Supreme Court clerkship, Schiltz returned to Minnesota and spent several years handling civil litigation at Faegre & Benson. He represented the Minnesota Vikings, the NFL, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, several Roman Catholic dioceses and even the Star Tribune. But he and his wife quit big law in 1999 — forsaking a large payout from the firm’s Exxon Valdez settlement — and took jobs teaching at Notre Dame.

They have three adult children, including a son with Down Syndrome, who was at home under Schiltz’s care last week when the Justice Department urgently sought the Lemon arrest warrant, according to aletter the judge sent to a federal appeals court.

At Notre Dame, Schiltz taught Amy Coney (now Barrett) as a student, later recommending her for her own clerkship with Scalia.

In 2000, Schiltz returned to Minnesota to help re-launch the University of St. Thomas law school, a project driven by Catholics eager to establish Catholic-oriented legal education in the Twin Cities. “This founding group believed that there was a Catholic perspective that had something to offer,” Osler said.

Schiltz, who served as the school’s founding associate dean, described it as a “faith-in-action” approach. While St. Thomas is noted for having an intellectually diverse faculty, Schiltz tolda Catholic magazine in 2002 that the professors included only two people who had ever voted Republican.

At his confirmation hearing in 2006, Schiltz said he’d helped advise C-SPAN on how to lobby the Supreme Court to open its arguments to TV cameras, even though his mentor, Scalia, remained adamantly opposed. In his Senate questionnaire, Schiltz also declared himself a member of Catholics Against Capital Punishment.

Schiltz’s position as chief judge is not an elected one. The seven-year-term is awarded on the basis of seniority, with judges ineligible to assume the position once they turn 65. Schiltz began his tenure as chief with a warning about the security of judges, telling the Star Tribune that “mobs” have increasingly made them targets of political rage and violent threats.

"There is a much more poisonous, angry atmosphere out there we are functioning in," he said.