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MEDIA REVIEWS Rough Road to Justice: The Journey of Women Lawyers in Texas Betty Trapp Chapman On May 19, 1902, the district court of El Paso County, after conducting a rigorous examination on all possible areas of law, procedure and legal history, granted a license to practice law to an applicant. Headlines followed. The precedent-breaking applicant: Mrs. Edith W. Locke—the first woman admitted to practice law in Texas. Although she did not practice law thereafter, Mrs. Locke settled a major question about the ability of women to even study law. Mrs. Locke studied law privately, since women were not allowed to enroll in Texas law schools at that time. Four years later, Mrs. Ella Crim Lynch broke the law school enrollment barrier, although she remained at UT only one year. Not until 1914 did a Texas law school confer law degrees on women—University of Texas graduates Irene Gertrude Brown (who returned to San Antonio to open a successful solo practice, which she expanded by marrying another lawyer) and Rose Zeloski (who became the first female member of the legal staff at American Telephone and Telegraph Company in New York). Straight up hill from there? Hardly. Texas was among the last states to allow women to sit on juries, by constitutional amendment in 1954. And as late as the 1960’s, most urban law firms did not hire women lawyers or worse, hired them only as legal secretaries. Ruby Kless Sondock, who would later sit on the Texas Supreme Court, entered University of Houston law school to become a better legal secretary. Friends persuaded her to broaden her career outlook, and in 1961 she passed the bar examination (subsequently completing the remaining 15 hours for her law degree). She was able to find a job—part time. After several years in law practice, she was the first woman named to a judicial position in Harris County (1973), first in a family court, then in state district court. In 1982 Sondock became the first woman to sit permanently on the Texas Supreme Court. Her appointment brought up a new round of comments about Hortense Ward, Hattie Henenberg and Ruth Brazzil, the three women lawyers who sat as the entire Texas Supreme Court very briefly in 1925 to hear the appeal in Johnson v Darr, the famous Woodmen of the World lodge case, after all Texas male attorneys were disqualified due to their automatic membership in the lodge (notably, such membership was not offered to women lawyers). In 1925, only ten of the thirty women lawyers had been licensed ten years, the requirement service on the Supreme Court. Looking back a century after Edith Locke made headlines in El Paso, attorney Ellen Elkins Grimes discovered in 2004 that no orderly record existed of the struggles and triumphs of women in Texas legal history. Clearly in the mainstream of Texas women lawyers, Grimes and the members of the State Bar’s Women in the Profession Committee obtained a small grant for the research and writing of a history, and followed up by raising the thousands of dollars needed to complete the book by donations from Texas law firms. Rough Road to Justice: the Journey of Women Lawyers in Texas, by Texas historian Betty Trapp Chapman is the informative and entertaining result.
The Washington Post Supreme Court Year in Review 2009 By the Washington Post This compilation by the journalists of the Washington Post newspaper covers 15 noteworthy cases from the United States Supreme Court’s 2007-08 year. The case summaries are divided into nine chapters, each covering a legal subject: habeas corpus, First Amendment, Second Amendment, Eighth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, federal sentencing guidelines, criminal law, employee benefits and torts. Each case summary consists of four parts, including excerpts from the text of the Court’s opinion, highlights from the dissenting opinion(s), the full text of the newspaper’s articles on the case and opinion, and a brief commentary on the case providing additional background and analysis. The journalists who edited the opinions and authored the background commentary are not identified, so the reader is left to guess about the assumptions applied to the editing and analyses of the cases. That said, the book is a fascinating compendium of an amazing year in the Supreme Court. This volume covers only 15 cases, but what a group—Guantanamo detainees, gun control, lethal injection, voting rights, and more. The book includes a useful index and a complete chronological list of all of the Court’s opinions issued during the 2007-08 term. Ann Zeigler is the articles editor of The Houston Lawyer. She is bankruptcy of counsel to Nelson S. Ebaugh, P.C. in Houston. |
