They could have chosen to live in Ponape, a green tropical island with waterfalls and mountains, but they chose Majuro, whose climate was so fierce that when Jim Plasman and Kathy Stratte stepped onto this coral atoll for the first time, they thought they were being hit by the jet wash of their plane.
That was 1979, when the couple left Bethel, Alaska, for the Marshall Islands. “The Marshall Islands (a U.S. Trust Territory then, now independent nation) is 29 atolls and islands spread over more than 500,000 sq miles of water, and each needed a local constitution,” Jim notes. “We took field trips by freighter to reach them. The work was interesting and intellectually challenging to see a new nation developing jurisprudence based on American law. It was a developing country replete with power outages and water hours, and we just loved it in spite of them.”
“We found we had made the right choice,” he continued. “Part of it is the people, who are clearly the friendliest and most hospitable of any in the Pacific. And almost any property is waterfront: crystal clear, with fantastic coral and fish. I got my scuba certification first thing. The people and the water kept us going back.”
Jim worked with the government as public defender and later, as legal advisor, helping to create the first local government constitutions. He and Kathy moved back to Alaska in 1981, returned to the Marshalls in 1990 when he became a Nuclear Claims Tribunal member, and later settled in Madison, Wisconsin, where they now live.
Between 1993 and 2006, Jim commuted to the Marshall Islands as special master. He and Kathy then returned to the islands. She became principal of the co-op school where she had taught in the 90s, and he continued his work as chair of the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which handles the adjudication of compensation for damage from nuclear testing conducted there from 1946 to 1958. “People’s lives were affected, and it was up to us to find a way to compensate them,” he notes. “Atolls suffered environmental damage and many people suffered radiation sickness. Some islands were vaporized and radiation related cancers continued to manifest years after the tests.” In 2008 he was tapped to serve as a High Court Associate Justice, a position he retired from in 2014. In addition to stimulating work, there was paradise enough: “On a typical Sunday, I would play tennis at the embassy, go boogie boarding, maybe snorkel on the lagoon side,” Jim said. “It was a small community but very diverse: Kathy’s school had kids from 17 countries enrolled. I enjoyed every minute of it.”