#Judge September 27

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This month the #Coach4adayChallenge for September is to profile a biography of someone. It may be hard to believe but North Carolina didn’t get their first female JUDGE until 1949.

Susie Marshall Sharp was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., on 7 July 1907 to James Merritt Sharp and Annie Britt Blackwell Sharp. Her achievements in the law profession paved the way for many females not only in North Carolina but the country.

Susie Marshall Sharp

Susie was the eldest of seven children who survived to adulthood, including Sally Blackwell, Annie Hill, Thomas Adolphus, Louise Wortham, Florence Abigail, and James Vance. When Sharp was 7 years old her dad moved his law practice from Rocky Mount NC to Reidsville NC.

Following her graduation from Reidsville High School she enrolled at North Carolina College for Women which today is UNC Greensboro. When she finished college in 1926, Sharp entered the School of Law at UNC Chapel Hill. No surprise she was the only female in her class.

She soon encountered the entrenched attitudes of the time that opposed women being lawyers. In spite of the obstacles, Sharp became an editor of the North Carolina Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. She received her LL.B. degree with honors in 1929. Sharp passed the bar examination in 1928 while still in school and returned to Reidsville in 1929 to practice law with her father. 

Over time Susie influence in both local government and politics grew. She was appointed as city attorney for Reidsville. in 1939. In 1948 her dad’s good friend Kerr Scott became a candidate for North Carolina Governorship. Scott asked Susie to become his campaign manager for Rockingham County.

After Scott’s victory he appointed Sharp in 1949 as North Carolina’s first Superior Court Judge. That appointment led her to becoming the first female judge in the state.

Her career didn’t stop at Superior Court. On March 9. 1962 NC Governor Terry Sanford appointed Sharp to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Justice Sharp’s appointment made her the first female member of the North Carolina Supreme Court but she wasn’t finished with firsts.

Forced by a newly enacted retirement law to retire in 1974, Chief Justice William Haywood Bobbitt and the rest of the court encouraged Sharp, as the senior associate justice, to seek the chief justiceship. In 1974, she became the first female in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court, garnering 74 percent of the vote.

During Justice Sharp’s seventeen-year tenure on the court, she wrote 459 majority opinions. If you want to learn more read the book “Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp”