Author to Discuss Life of NC's First Woman Supreme Court Justice

Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp
Talk by Anna Hayes
Thursday, September 11, at 5:45 p.m.
Pleasants Family Assembly Room, Wilson Library
Free and open to the public
Information: Liza Terll (919-962-4207)

Cover of Without Precedent

Aug. 25 - When Susie Marshall Sharp launched her North Carolina law practice in 1929, women could not yet serve on juries in the state. By her retirement fifty years later, Sharp (1907-1996) had become the first woman judge in North Carolina, the first woman appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court, and the first woman in the United States to be elected chief justice of a state supreme court.

Sharp's family background, her career as an attorney, judge and politician, and her previously unexamined private life are recounted in Anna Hayes's book, Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp.

Published by the University of North Carolina Press, the book will be launched Sept. 11, in Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The free public program will be at 5:45 p.m. in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room. For program information, contact Liza Terll (919-962-4207).

D.G. Martin, host of UNC-TV's North Carolina Bookwatch and of the WCHL radio daily interview program, Who's Talking, will introduce Hayes, who will speak at the program. Copies of Without Precedent will be available for sale and signing.

Through Sharp's family, Hayes accessed the justice's personal papers and records. Materials in the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection of UNC's Wilson Library rounded out the picture of Sharp's career and a rich romantic life, unsuspected even by her family.

Hayes, a native of North Carolina, attended the UNC School of Law. A former partner in the law firm of Manning, Fulton & Skinner, P.A., she is a trustee of the North Carolina Supreme Court Historical Society, where she was instrumental in obtaining a number of Sharp artifacts for its collection.