By Vickie Berkow
In a time when the Supreme Court of the United States was facing “chaos,” Federal Judge Michael Mihm assumed the bench. From passing the bar in 1967, to his appointment as a judge in 1982, to overseeing cases today with senior status, Mihm has witnessed an ever changing docket in a changing America. Below is Mihm’s story and a timeline on the radical ’60s which changed the face of American law.
A “moving merry-go-round”: the struggles and triumphs of a federal judge
The inside of a judge’s mind can be full of stories and cases from years past. But inside one judge’s chamber in the Central District of Illinois’ federal courtroom, the stories are in full view.
The centerpiece of this particular chamber is a giant glass table lined with faces of people from around the world. Each photograph represents one of Federal Judge Michael Mihm’s travels.
Mihm has worked in the Peoria courthouse since his 1982 appointment by President Ronald Reagan. He’s on senior status now, which means he’s dropped down to half docket (“but the volume of cases is up, so I’m fairly busy,” he explained).
He said he enjoys his most recent work in international rule of law, where he participates in conferences and law events across the globe, which started 22 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed.
“The chief justice at that time, William Rehnquist, was named to be the first chairman of the international committee of our conference,” Mihm said. “So starting then, I’ve been doing international work. That’s never stopped being exciting.”
One beloved photograph is obviously a candid shot. A younger-looking Mihm stands with two other American lawmakers and a foreign woman with a slight frown. In the center is a man with a traditional style black Russian fur hat and a disgruntled look settled across his lips.
The picture was taken in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in December, 1994.
“This is my favorite picture right here,” Mihm said. “We were giving a conference on First Amendment issues. Over a break, this lady came up to talk to us” – he pointed to the woman in the photograph – “because her husband had just been snatched by the Secret Police. She wanted us to speak with the ambassador.”
Mihm started to chuckle as he moves on to the next part of the story.
“When she started talking to us, this guy came over” – he points to the faux-Russo in the middle – “who I noticed from across the room. Some journalist started taking pictures of us then, and he immediately came over and positioned himself within the middle of us. And guess what? He was the head of the Secret Police.”
Mihm, just like his photographs, is full of stories, although his tales of international travel and tangoes with Secret Police are only recent. He’s had a long career as a judge and a lawyer in the Midwest with plenty of interesting memories.
Born in Amboy, Illinois, Mihm graduated from Loras College in 1964. Upon graduation, Mihm was at a crossroads between pursuing journalism, attending a diplomat career school in Washington, D.C. and attending law school. He said an uncle’s guidance led him toward the latter, although his father wasn’t pleased.
“When I went to my father and said ‘Hey, I’ve decided I want to go to law school,’ he said: ‘That’s great, I’m happy you made a decision. But don’t expect me to help you out because I won’t pay to have a thief in the family,’” Mihm said.
With little options money-wise, Mihm needed a full scholarship to law school. He decided on St. Louis University after the opportunity, and scholarship, presented itself.
“The day I got there, I had $4.20 to my name,” Mihm said. “I told the dean of the law school that when I met him that day, and he said ‘Don’t worry about that, a couple other people have the same problem.’ We waited, and at the end of the day he took us to an orphanage. I stayed there for about three months in a tiny, little room with a nail on the back of the door as a closet. I got three meals a day, and all we had to do was play with the kids for a couple of hours.”
Mihm worked the entire time he attended SLU, at both a department store and a Downtown law firm. His work, combined with law school, posed a slight challenge at first.
“The first year [of law school] was an adjustment. I think a lot of lawyers feel that way,” Mihm said. “I realized what they do the first semester is strip your mind down and start to rebuild it. You start seeing the world in a whole different way and analyze things differently.”
As Mihm prepared to take the bar exam in 1967, the Vietnam War was raging on. Mihm said his original plan was to volunteer as a war officer for two years, but when the volunteer period stretched to four years, he waited to be drafted.
“I got the notice that said ‘Greetings, we know you’re taking the bar exam July 28, and we’ll welcome you into the army July 29,’” Mihm said.
He and his fiancé moved up their wedding date to May to accommodate for the war.
“That summer I went up for my physical,” Mihm said. “I’ve had really bad hearing problems since I was a child, so I didn’t pass the physical. The doctor said something like ‘We’ll call you if we need a hostage. We’re afraid you won’t hear the enemy coming.’”
With the availability to start working, Mihm took both the Missouri and Illinois bar exams. He settled in Missouri for his first job as assistant prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County. He would later make his way to practice law in the Prairie State.
“I really enjoyed my job in St. Louis,” Mihm said. “Since I wanted to be a trial lawyer, I couldn’t have a better way to start. The first day I was there, I shook hands, took the oath, and the guy handed me a docket with a hundred cases on it and said ‘Here are your cases for today.’ I got a lot of trial experiences very quickly, made a lot of mistakes, and tried not to make the same mistakes twice.”
Mihm stayed in St. Louis for about a year. He then moved to Peoria, where he and another lawyer were the first full-time assistant state’s attorneys ever in Peoria County.
Shortly after that, he worked for the City of Peoria as an assistant corporation counsel. He also worked with the police department.
“I was like a police legal advisor, which meant I did training with the officers,” Mihm said. “It was a very chaotic time because the Supreme Court was throwing out cases in that period [1967 to 1972] that totally changed the law.”
In October 1972, Mihm decided to run for state’s attorney, which he won. He served for eight years and then was in private practice for two years before an opportunity to become a judge presented itself. In August 1982, Mihm was appointed by President Reagan as a federal judge on the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois.
Similar to his first weeks of law school, Mihm said the transition was a challenge.
“When I became a judge, it was like getting on a merry-go-round that’s already moving,” Mihm said. “There were brand new cases, cases that had been around for a while, all sorts of different issues. The variety of cases was staggering.”
Mihm started with 400 to 500 cases. He said he instantly hired two law clerks to help him.
“It was like three people in a boat trying to keep the water from sinking you,” he said.
Struggling to keep up with all the challenges, Mihm sought advice from the man he replaced, Judge Robert D. Morgan.
“He had a reputation of being the god of the Old Testament,” Mihm said. “I went to see him a couple months after I started and I said ‘I don’t know if I can do this. I just don’t feel like I’m in control of the situation.’”
Morgan provided Mihm with some solid advice.
“The problem is that you think you have to be the smartest person in the room,” Mihm said Morgan told him. “With all due respect, that will almost never be the case. You have to get rid of that idea that you have to be the smartest person. However, you have to insist that [lawyers] educate you, and that you educate yourself.”
Mihm said that’s the best advice he ever received.
“Sometimes when I was struggling and I put pressure on the lawyers to educate me, I found out they didn’t really understand it either. It was definitely a learning process,” he said.
The learning process paid off, and Mihm has been on the bench for more than 30 years.
He said several cases from his time as a lawyer and a judge stick out in his mind, including an outlaw motorcycle gang who gang-raped a woman on the North end of Peoria when he was state’s attorney.
“What was really interesting about it was the first day, before the jury selection, half the court room was filled with bikers. I thought ‘Oh my God, we need to do something about this,’” Mihm said.
He called the chief of police and asked for a dozen of his biggest officers to fill the front two rows of the gallery. But that didn’t stop the gang. During the first lunch hour, some of the jurors mentioned some bikers had photographed them.
“We immediately got three or four photographers, and we followed the bikers around all the time, taking pictures of them,” Mihm said. “It was a psychological type of warfare.”
Another interesting case while Mihm was a judge involved a man and woman who duped lonely men with fake brochures about beautiful, young nuns in Mexico looking for Americans. The pair made $4 million from the scam.
“That got a lot of attention. Journalists from Australia and Japan came,” Mihm said. “The courtroom was filled with lonely men; they were not angry, they still believed. I said [to the pair] ‘Shame on you. If you have any decency you need to turn around and tell these men it’s not real.’ But they didn’t do it.”
Mihm said the docket has changed a bit over the years.
“When I first came on the bench, I seemed to get a lot more constitutional issues like First Amendment issues,” he said. “Ten years ago, 25 to 30 percent of my docket was employment discrimination cases. Now the biggest type of case is prisoner civil rights cases, almost 40 percent of the docket, and that explains a lot in the increase in the volume of dockets.
Like his changing docket, Mihm said his favorite part of being a federal judge has progressed throughout the years. What he enjoys most now, he said, is giving back to those still in law school (he teaches one-week courses in Chicago on trial advocacy) and those recently graduated.
“I really enjoy seeing young lawyers operate and help them in any way I can,” Mihm said.
Like with his first experiences in law school and the transition into a judge, Mihm said he’s seen dips in his career.
“There were times when the money was so little that I almost quit because I couldn’t meet my family responsibilities,” he said. “Then we got just enough of a raise that I could stay. It’s not a downside now because the salary has gone up quite a bit. But there were many days where I wondered if I should stay on the job or not.”
But with everything he experienced, from studying to St. Louis to traveling to Moscow and Beijing for international law, Mihm said it’s been a good career.
“It’s a good life. I see some good lawyers here in the federal court,” he said. “It certainly gives you a front row seat on what’s going on in society.”
Mapping the new laws
The 1960s and 1970s were “chaotic” in the United States, Mihm said, as the Supreme Court faced landmark cases that changed the face of the law. Click here to read more about some of the cases that affected how Mihm worked as a lawyer and a judge.