Lisa Fair McEvers, Class of '97, Installed as ND Supreme Court Justice

Document Type

News Article

Publication Date

1-21-2014

Campus Unit

School of Law

Abstract

A formal investiture ceremony to install Justice Lisa Fair McEvers as a member of the North Dakota Supreme Court was held Jan. 17 at the State Capitol. Justice McEvers became the 50th justice of the Court in the state's 125th year of history.

Growing up in the small town of Minto in northeastern North Dakota, Lisa Fair McEvers said she developed a "Class B mentality." "I thought I could do anything I set my mind to, and mostly I did," she said.

On Friday, Fair McEvers was officially seated with the North Dakota Supreme Court, the pinnacle of a career that first saw her rise from law clerk to attorney to state labor commissioner to district judge.

Jack McDonald of the State Bar Association presented Fair McEvers with her official Supreme Court robe and Chief Justice Gerald VandeWalle administered the oath, officially making her the fourth woman to serve on the state's highest court.

Gov. Jack Dalrymple, who appointed Fair McEvers to the Supreme Court in November to fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Mary Muehlen Maring, said she has "really a fantastic range of experience and knowledge that really is what makes up the right stuff for being a North Dakota Supreme Court justice."

Fair McEvers worked in court administration for seven years before attending the University of North Dakota School of Law, earning her law degree in 1997. She served as a law clerk for the North Dakota Supreme Court in 1997-98 and worked in private practice from 1998 until 2001, when she became an assistant state's attorney in Cass County.

Gov. John Hoeven appointed her commissioner of labor in 2005 and to a district judgeship in 2010. She was elected to the post in 2012.

Fair McEvers began her work on the Supreme Court on Jan. 2.

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