The Passing of Hans Linde, Human Rights Hero

Hans Linde, former justice of the Oregon Supreme Court and professor at Oregon Law School, passed away on Monday at age 96.  Among Linde’s many notable contributions, in 1981, Justice Linde authored the opinion in Sterling v. Cupp, which explicitly recognized the role of international human rights law in informing the analysis of personal dignity under the Oregon State Constitution.  The issue was whether requiring prisoners to submit to “pat-downs” by guards of the opposite sex violated the Oregon Constitution.  Citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights, and other international human rights standards, Justice Linde opined that “[t]he various formulations in these different sources in themselves are not constitutional law. We cite them here as contemporary expressions of the same concern with minimizing needlessly harsh, degrading, or dehumanizing treatment of prisoners that is expressed in [the Oregon Constitution.]” Led by Linde, the Court concluded that except in exceptional circumstances, cross-gender touching of a prisoner’s intimate areas violated the prisoner’s constitutional rights.

In 2014, the American Bar Association declared Hans Linde to be a “human rights hero.” The ABA’s citation provides an elegant summation appropriate to this occasion: “this grand persona of American law has enriched our understanding of that law while also buttressing our commitment to human rights.”