A few months after law school, Esther Jeanne Moellering arrived alone for an honors dinner at the Minneapolis Athletic Club and was told to wait in the coatroom until her male companion came. Esther Tomljanovich, who went on to help open Minnesota's legal institutions to women as a judge, mentor, and state Supreme Court justice, died on July 26, 2026, at her home in Lake Elmo. She was 94.

The episode, reported by the Pioneer Press, showed the professional world Tomljanovich entered. Born in Galt, Iowa, she moved with her family at age two to Buck Lake in northern Minnesota. A teacher who boarded with the family encouraged her reading, while the radio drama Portia Faces Life offered an unusual model: a woman practicing law.

After Nashwauk High School and Itasca Junior College, Tomljanovich entered the St. Paul College of Law as the only woman in her class. She worked at Minnesota Mutual Life Insurance Company while attending night classes and graduated in 1955 as one of the class's top three students. Decades later, she described the limits women faced: "When I went to law school, I was competition for nobody," she said in a video reported by Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

She found a route into public law. In 1957, the year she married her law school classmate William Tomljanovich, she became Minnesota's Assistant Revisor of Statutes. When her son, William, was born in 1966, she left full-time work but continued legal and editorial assignments, including proposed criminal procedure rules. She joined the House Research Department in 1971, then became Revisor of Statutes in 1974.

Governor Rudy Perpich appointed her to the Tenth Judicial District on August 30, 1977, making her the second woman then to hold a Minnesota trial judgeship. Voters returned her to office in 1978 and 1984, and her colleagues chose her as assistant chief judge in 1989. The next year, Perpich appointed her to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Official Minnesota State Law Library records place her service there from 1990 through 1998.

Tomljanovich brought the trial court's crowded calendars and immediate decisions into the appellate court's deliberations. She encouraged the Supreme Court to hear arguments beyond St. Paul so Minnesotans could see its work. "Our experiences were different, and it was important to bring those experiences," she said of women judges in 2022. She chaired the court's Gender Fairness Implementation Committee, turning that conviction into work on how women were treated throughout Minnesota's judicial system.

Her influence widened after retirement. She helped revive a women-in-law tea at her alma mater, and it grew into the annual Justice Esther M. Tomljanovich Celebration of Women in Law. She spent 20 years on Medica's board, helped establish the Medica Foundation, and supported a Mitchell Hamline scholarship for women studying law. In 2011, the American Bar Association honored her with its Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.

Chief Justice Natalie Hudson said Tomljanovich paired a "giant legal mind" with an exceptional commitment to younger attorneys, especially women. Her son expressed the ethic beneath that work more simply: "She didn't think you were being good if you didn't do something useful for somebody else." She was survived by him and by her grandsons, Tony and Justin. Her husband died in 2025.

Tomljanovich's work remained visible in Minnesota's statute books, in the court she helped bring before communities around the state, and in the women who entered legal careers with mentors and scholarships she helped provide. The annual celebration bearing her name continues her practical form of fellowship: opening a room, drawing people together, and making sure the next woman did not have to wait outside.