In 1996, the Seattle Seahawks came closer to leaving Washington than most fans ever realized. Before he was a judge, Dave Larson was a trial attorney and a citizen who cared deeply about his community — and he was one of the lawyers who stepped up to fight for the fans.
On February 2, 1996, Seahawks owner Ken Behring publicly announced the franchise was moving to Southern California. Within days, moving trucks were on the road to Anaheim carrying the team’s training equipment. He wasn’t bluffing.
The pretext was the aging Kingdome — waterlogged ceiling tiles had begun falling into the seating bowl during games, and Behring wanted out. Season ticket demand had cratered from a 30,000-name waiting list to games struggling to draw 40,000 fans. He believed he could get to Los Angeles before anyone could stop him.
By the time the trucks hit the freeway, three legal actions were forming against the move — and one of them was Dave’s. He was in his 30s, running his own trial practice in Federal Way, with no political profile and no obligation to get involved. He got involved anyway.
Dave’s case was on behalf of Seahawks season ticket holders — the fans who had bought 1996 tickets in good faith, believing they were buying access to a Seattle team. His theory was straightforward: Behring had continued selling those tickets to Washingtonians while concealing his intent to move the franchise.
The class action put the fans directly at the center of the fight, alongside King County’s temporary restraining order and Attorney General Christine Gregoire’s federal antitrust suit. That combination was the point. Dave’s action was the one that spoke for the ticket holders. The county’s TRO was the one that stopped the trucks. Gregoire’s suit was the one that got the NFL’s attention. Together they made clear — to Behring, to the league, and to the national sports press — that no owner was walking away from Seattle without a fight from the community he was abandoning.
At 38 years old, running a young trial practice with no political profile, Dave chose to take on a billionaire owner and a national league on behalf of ordinary ticket holders — because they had a case, and someone had to make it.
Facing a fractured relocation effort and a mounting PR crisis, the NFL made clear it would not approve the move without a viable Seattle stadium plan. Behring pulled operations back from Anaheim by summer. Paul Allen bought the franchise in June 1997, and Washington voters approved public financing for what became Lumen Field that same year.
Everything that followed — the 12s, the Super Bowl runs, the transformation of the franchise into a Northwest institution — traces back to a fight in the winter of 1996 that most fans never got the full story of. Dave was in the middle of it. At 38, running a young trial practice with no political profile, he took on a billionaire owner and a national league on behalf of ordinary ticket holders because they had a case, and someone had to make it. Thirty years later, the instinct is the same.
Dave is running for Washington State Supreme Court, Position 5, in 2026. Learn more about his record — or help send him to the bench where those instincts matter most.