New Alaska Supreme Court chief justice worked the trans-Alaska pipeline before starting a long legal career

The new chief justice of the Alaska Supreme Court is a third-generation Alaskan who worked on the trans-Alaska pipeline before heading to law school and embarking on a long legal career.

The other justices this week unanimously selected Justice Daniel E. Winfree as chief justice of the state’s highest court, according to an announcement from the Alaska Court System. Winfree joined the state Supreme Court in 2008 and follows Chief Justice Joel H. Bolger, whose term expires June 30.

Winfree, whose three-year term begins July 1, will be the first Alaska-born chief justice and second one from Fairbanks, court officials say. He is married to Cathleen Ringstad Winfree, “another Fairbanks-born, third-generation Alaskan” with whom he has two children.

Chief justices serves as administrative head of the judicial branch, presiding over Supreme Court arguments and conferences, appointing presiding judges for judicial districts and chairing the Alaska Judicial Council.

Winfree, whose grandparents were “turn-of-the-century Yukon and Alaska gold rushers,” was born in the Alaska Territory in 1953, courts officials said. He drove trucks and worked as a warehouseman in pipeline construction camps and at Prudhoe Bay, working on the trans-Alaska pipeline before attending college at the University of Oregon and getting his law degree from the University of California Berkeley.

Admitted to the Alaska Bar in 1982, he spent 25 years in private practice in Anchorage, Valdez and Fairbanks. He served with the Alaska Bar Association Board of Governors and Board of Trustees of the Alaska Bar Foundation and chairs the Supreme Court’s Code of Judicial Conduct Rules Committee and Appellate Rules Committee.