By U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Peter McKittrick and Diane K. Bridge
This article is based on an oral history conducted by Janice Dilg in 2015 and 2016 and some additional research. The oral history is on file with the Oregon Historical Society on behalf of the US District Court of Oregon Historical Society. The transcript of Judge Perris’s oral history can be found at https://usdchs.org/oral-histories/elizabeth-perris/.
Elizabeth Perris served as a U.S. bankruptcy judge in the District of Oregon for 31 years. Her accomplishments are stunning. Respected judge, educator to judges, lawyers, and students, pro bono leader—Elizabeth Perris did it all. Her legacy through her work is both local and national.
Family and Youth
Perris was born in Dayton, Ohio in September 1951 to Allen and Joan Perris. She is the oldest in a family of two daughters and a son. As a young child, she moved with her family to Southern California where her father found work in real estate. She loved that she could swim and skateboard for most of the year. Her family moved to the San Francisco suburb of San Mateo when she was in high school.
The summer after Perris’s first year in high school, she participated in a residential six-week-long program at Stanford run by an organization called the Junior Statesmen of America. Roughly eighty teenagers from all over California learned about government and economics. “It was very intense. I mean, we stayed up late. We studied and we talked. It was a little taste of what college would be like, although you could not sustain the level of energy we sustained for six weeks through a school year. But it was kind of an eye opener that it’s a bigger world out there.”
Perris finished high school when she was 16 years old. She also found time to work during high school. Her first job was with Polaroid as a file clerk. She had a summer job working for a company that produced large print books for the visually impaired, cutting up texts and sending pages out to a printer to enlarge the print, then hole-punching the pages and putting them in binders. Hers was, as she said, a typical 1950s three-child family upbringing. She recalls in her oral history, “I can’t say that we were terribly put-upon children. Our main job was to do a good job in school and to be responsible kids.”
College and Law School
Perris did her undergraduate work at the University of California Berkeley. Her first year at Berkeley, when she had just turned 17 years old, was especially formative. She lived in a 20-person co-op housing arrangement, where she made many great friends. She continues to stay in touch with six of them on a regular basis.
Perris’s time at Berkeley was marked by student protests and political activity. Perris was used to lively political debates, as she grew up in a “split” household—one of her parents was a Democrat while the other was a Republican. She enjoyed listening to speakers and watching the protests but was mainly an observer during the unrest rather than a participant. “At one point, I remember sitting in a classroom and the protestors came by. They started throwing rocks through the windows. The professor said, ‘Oh I think we better move over closer to the wall.’ But that’s how it was my first year, so I was kind of surprised my second year when things calmed down and you actually had to do all the work and there wasn’t quite as much excitement on campus.” She decided early on that she wanted to study criminology, but she enjoyed many other classes including zoology, astronomy, and other liberal arts courses. By her junior year at Berkeley, Perris decided she wanted to go to law school. She thought that the law was very practical, and it was flexible, providing lots of choices when you had your degree. Her interest in the law was buttressed by an attorney she heard speak at Berkeley about her work fighting employment discrimination.
After living in the Bay Area for many years, the University of California Davis was her first choice for law school. When she did not get in, she decided to go to Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon. Perris said going to Willamette and living in Salem was “like getting into a time machine and going backwards.” She remembers there were 13 women in her class at Willamette. Although that was a small minority of the class, Perris noted it was a large improvement over the previous years. After one year at Willamette, she fulfilled her dream of going to UC Davis by transferring there for the balance of law school. Perris graduated from UC Davis Law School in 1975.
Starting a Legal Career
Following graduation, her first job was working with a general practitioner. The firm had the contract to do public defender work. The experience made her realize she did not want to do criminal law. Perris decided she wanted to practice in an area where “money was the measure.” Perris originally took the California bar exam, thinking at the time she would remain in California. However, her stay in California would come to an end as she decided to move to Oregon to take advantage of the outdoor opportunities. She took the winter bar exam in Oregon. To make ends meet while she was studying for the bar, she worked preparing tax returns.
Perris’ first job in Oregon after successfully passing the bar was with the bankruptcy court. In 1976, while awaiting the bar results, she was hired as the first paid law clerk for three of the bankruptcy judges, Judges Donal Sullivan, Henry Hess, and Folger Johnson. The court had no law clerk position, so the judges convinced the administrative office to let them hire Perris as a “closing clerk,” which was a clerical position and have her perform the work of a law clerk. She enjoyed working for all three of the judges; she remembers this experience fondly. And she found bankruptcy to be fascinating. It had many of the elements in the law that she enjoyed: It was statutorily based, the issues were about money, and there were rules. Her work for the court included writing memos and sitting through trials. She feels fortunate to have been able to start her legal career with the bankruptcy court at the historic Pioneer Courthouse. During her tenure as a law clerk at the court, the court moved from the Pioneer Courthouse to its current location in a private office building.
After leaving the bankruptcy court, her first legal practice job was with the firm of McMenamin, Joseph, and Herrell. She chose the firm because it had a healthy bankruptcy practice, along with probate, domestic relations, and workers’ compensation. Shortly after Perris joined the firm, Stephen Herrell–the partner who had the bankruptcy practice (and a future Multnomah County circuit judge), had a heart attack. Perris jumped into the fray and started picking up a significant amount of his bankruptcy work. She also became a bankruptcy trustee, a position she continued to hold through her practice career. She remembers that bankruptcy practice was an expanding field, due to the new Bankruptcy Code paired with a difficult economic climate in Oregon. There was lots of bankruptcy work to be found, and Perris was among the many young lawyers who seized the opportunity. In early 1983, Perris and Ward Greene left the firm and started their own even smaller firm. They decided to specialize in commercial and business law. Perris did the bankruptcy work while Greene did more of the state court work.
Work and Life Changes
Perris had the unique experience of working through several significant changes to the bankruptcy system. The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 brought about a revised Bankruptcy Code. Then in 1982 the first big change occurred. The Supreme Court ruled in the Marathon Oil case that the bankruptcy jurisdictional provisions of the Code were unconstitutional. It was a time of great uncertainty in the bankruptcy world. Congress promptly went about passing legislation to fix the problem. Unfortunately, the timing of the Marathon case coincided with Perris’s selection to the bankruptcy bench in late 1983. At that time, she was appointed by the district court rather than the court of appeals as is now customary. Perris recalls the process in her oral history. “First of all, it was one screening. You went for one interview. There were a few people: the chief district judge or somebody he or she appoints and a few lawyers they appoint. They just made a decision. You sent them a resume, not their form. I sent them a two- or three-page resume. We had a nice chat for 30 minutes and two or three weeks later, from the time I applied, to the time I got the call from the district judge telling me I had got it, subject to an F.B.I. check.”
Perris was set to begin her judgeship April 1, 1984, when the system’s revamping was complete. Her predecessor, Judge Folger Johnson, wanted to serve to the end of the transition. Three days before her planned investiture and Judge Johnson’s retirement celebration (which was planned as a combined event), the transition to the new jurisdictional system was extended by 30 days. Perris had given up her law practice a month earlier and now she was caught in limbo. After weeks of uncertainty, she was finally sworn in, started her judgeship, and was hearing cases by July 1984. She was 32 years old and had been practicing bankruptcy law since 1977.
1984 was momentous for another reason. Elizabeth Perris started a relationship with the woman who would be her life partner and eventually her wife. She had been friends with Beverly Schnabel since 1979. Schnabel came to Portland in 1970 after attending Grinnell College in Iowa. She and her friends founded a free women’s health clinic and a halfway house for incarcerated women. She earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in audiology at Portland State University and later her doctorate. Judge Perris recalls, “I actually had more time to live my life in an orderly fashion since I’ve been a judge than I did when I was a lawyer. As a lawyer, it’s crisis after crisis…. We were friends for five years before we got together. We did lots of camping, and skiing, and hiking, and that sort of thing. Of course, times were pretty different…. If you told me in 1984 that someday we’d be legally married and she would have benefits, I would have laughed at you. Because I got to worry about whether I would pass the F.B.I. check in 1983, because I figured the F.B.I. would figure this out. It was not a secret.”
Bankruptcy Judgeship
In her early years on the bench, Judge Perris spent most of her time dealing with Chapter 11 commercial cases. In 1986, she estimates that the district had 200 Chapter 11 cases. She took an active management role in her cases, believing that creditors needed to either get paid reasonably fast, or be told promptly there would not be any money in the case. “Filing a chapter 11 or any sort of bankruptcy was a lot like hiring a taxi. You could pay it to wait, or you could pay it to drive. So, you may as well pay it to drive because at least you’d get somewhere.”
During her years as a bankruptcy judge, Judge Perris presided over several high-profile cases. Here a sampling of her most memorable cases: in 1986, an involuntary case against one of the Rajneesh corporations during the time when the followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh were leaving Rajneeshpuraman (an intentional religious community in Wasco County, Oregon) and fleeing the country; Melridge, Inc., a flower bulb farm; Hoyt & Sons Ranches, which involved an investment scam and tax fraud based on traveling cattle; the Portland Archdiocese, the first archdiocese bankruptcy in the nation, which resulted from clergy sexual abuse claims; and the Oregon Arena Corp., commonly known as the Rose Garden (and now known as the Moda Center). The Portland Archdiocese case was perhaps the most challenging. It was the first case of its kind and was highly contentious. She had to rule on many novel issues, including ownership of church properties.
Judge Perris served two non-consecutive terms on the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel, a panel of bankruptcy judges who are appointed as volunteers to hear appeals from bankruptcy cases around the Ninth Circuit. The job required traveling around the circuit and sitting on a 3-judge panel once or twice a month. The work was intense; it added about 30 to 40 percent to the judge’s existing trial court workload. Perris served as Chief Judge of the BAP for two years.
Luckey, Henry Hess; (standing) Albert Radcliffe, Polly Higdon, Donal D. Sullivan, Elizabeth
Perris, and Frank Alley
Toward the end of her tenure as a bankruptcy judge, the type of cases she handled changed. Her caseload, which had started as primarily business-related bankruptcy cases, veered towards smaller consumer cases. Just as her young judicial career started with a major change in the bankruptcy system, her mature career was marked by the passing of the Bankruptcy Abuse and Consumer Protection Act in October 2005, commonly referred to as BAPCPA. This created a sudden spike in consumer cases in 2005, and a dearth of cases in 2006 and 2007. As the economy crumbled in late 2007, the case load picked up again.
Judge Perris feels fortunate that her career spanned the time between the Marathon Oil case and the 2011 Supreme Court case of Stern v. Marshall, which limited the bankruptcy court’s authority to enter final judgments in certain cases. In her oral history, Judge Perris commented: “But it really did feel like bookmarks to my career. Marathon Oil at the beginning, and Stern v. Marshall at the end, because basically Marathon put the bankruptcy court back in business and Stern potentially undermined what business the bankruptcy court could do. I felt like I was there in the best of years, in-between those two.”
Judge Perris noted in her oral history that her mother always told her “you just have to try. You don’t have to be successful, but you have to try.” By that definition, Judge Perris says she feels she was very successful. However, she expresses disappointment that the bankruptcy system has provided less and less relief to debtors through the years, saying: “the current system is not beneficial to where we are. I just hope that it’s swung a little too far and it’s going to swing back.”
Educator
Perris’s accomplishments in providing continuing legal education to lawyers and judges are remarkable. Early on in her career, while serving on the CLE committee for the Oregon State Bar, she spearheaded efforts to start the CLE Season Pass, which allowed those who were interested to attend as many CLE programs as they wanted at a set price. Judge Perris noted, “I thought people ought to be able to get all the education they could endure.”
She was a favorite and frequent speaker at numerous local CLE programs on bankruptcy and creditor’s rights. Judge Perris also served on the faculty of the Federal Judicial Center, where she and a handful of other experienced judges were responsible for putting on educational programs for bankruptcy judges around the country. As a regular instructor at “baby judge school” (aka Orientation Seminar for Newly Appointed Bankruptcy Judges) she became known to new judges around the country. Judge Perris also traveled through international organizations to teach the basics of bankruptcy and commercial law to judges in Palestine, Macedonia, and Romania. She taught basic bankruptcy and advanced bankruptcy courses at Lewis and Clark Law School and Willamette Law School. With three other writers, she co-authored the third edition of Bankruptcy: Materials and Cases, a textbook on bankruptcy law for law students.
Judge Perris was appointed to the National Rules Committee for bankruptcy and chaired the National Forms Modernization Committee, which worked from 2008 until December 2015 to modernize the national bankruptcy forms. Goals included making the national forms more user-friendly and the data more easily extracted for record-keeping and research purposes. She remembers many 6:00 a.m. telephone meetings with other members of the committee, most of whom were on the East Coast.
Judge Perris is a strong supporter of access to justice. She was instrumental in starting the Pro Bono Clinic for bankruptcy clients, a program jointly administered by the Debtor Creditor Section of the Oregon State Bar and Legal Aid Services of Oregon. This program has provided access to bankruptcy legal representation for thousands of individuals who otherwise could not have afforded basic legal services.
Settlement Judge/Mediator
Along with her many other accomplishments, Judge Perris may be best known in the bankruptcy community for her expertise as a settlement judge/mediator. She was in high demand locally for settlement conferences in many Oregon bankruptcy cases. Building on that expertise, and her national reputation, Perris was called on to mediate significant municipal bankruptcy cases in other jurisdictions. Those cases included the City of Vallejo, California, the Town of Mammoth Lakes, California, the City of Stockton, California, and most notably the City of Detroit, Michigan. As the only bankruptcy judge appointed to the mediation team for the Detroit bankruptcy, Perris was instrumental in assisting the parties and the court in getting Detroit’s bankruptcy plan approved in prompt fashion.
Awards, Recognition, Retirement
Judge Perris has been honored with numerous awards by local and national organizations. Those awards include the Award of Merit given by the Debtor Creditor Section of the Oregon State Bar, the Pro Bono Award given by the Multnomah Bar Association, and many other State Bar recognitions. Recently, Perris was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Service Award by the American College of Bankruptcy. The College is an invitation-only organization of the most highly respected bankruptcy professionals around the country. The Distinguished Service Award is essentially its “lifetime achievement award.”
In 2014, Judge Perris decided it was time to retire and enjoy her hobbies of traveling, hiking, skiing, and spending time with her wife Bev Schnabel. During most of their years together, same-sex marriage was outlawed. Perris and Schnabel were married in Oregon during a brief period when Multnomah County issued same-sex marriage licenses in March and April 2004. After the courts declared the Multnomah County marriages invalid, the couple married again in Canada, surrounded by family and friends. Perris fought a long battle to get Bev the benefits to which spouses are entitled from the federal government, rights equal to any other spouse. Perris ultimately succeeded in obtaining benefits for Bev after the 2013 Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the limitation on providing benefits to same-sex spouses. Sadly, Bev passed away in October 2017 after a long illness.
Most of All, a Trial Judge
Ninth Circuit Judge Randy Smith has referred to Judge Perris as a “star.” The bar in Oregon did not see her accomplishments as a judicial teacher, or as a mediator in the municipal bankruptcy cases. What they saw, day in and day out, was a bankruptcy judge who was well prepared, fair to all parties, compassionate to debtors, and had an uncanny understanding of the practicalities of a case. She never lost sight of her most important job, to serve the court and litigants in Oregon in a fair and timely manner.