Carolyn Dimmick Final PDF.indd - Washington Secretary of State

questioning the jurors. … Running a courtroom was the hard part.
Hughes: Any memorable cases from that era?
Dimmick: They were all memorable when you pick them up and look at them again. But
it’s a blur when you don’t think of one individual case. I had a lot of them. It went up and
down.
Hughes: Well, judge, you have another claim to fame: Ed Donohoe, the legendary editor of
the Washington Teamster newspaper, defended you in his “Tilting the Windmill” column.
In the fall of 1978, you ordered striking Seattle teachers back to work. Peeved, the King
County Labor Council got in a purple snit
and withdrew its endorsement of you
even though your term as Superior Court
judge didn’t expire for two more years.
Jim Bender, the executive secretary of the
Labor Council, said the unions were upset
because you not only signed a preliminary
Dimmick on the King County Superior Court bench during
arguments over the Seattle teacher’s strike in 1978.
Seattle Times
injunction ordering the teachers back
to work, you declared that all publicemployee
strikes were illegal. Shades of Calvin
Coolidge. When he was governor of Massachusetts in 1919 he declared, “There is no right
to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
Bender asserted, “That broad stroke was out of order … She was trying to legislate.”
Then you came right back and said you were doing no such thing. “If they are going to fault
judges for upholding the law,” you said, “that’s the way the ball bounces. It is common law
that governmental employees cannot strike. Either the Supreme Court or the Legislature
would have to change that.”
Ed Donahoe, whose column was a must-read, wrote, “In defense of Judge Dimmick,
she was among a dozen King County jurists who refused to attend a convention at Ocean
Shores because the resort was on the unfair list, and she is considered one of the most
intelligent and fairest persons on the local bench – attributes that seem to be in short
supply these days.”
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