page_title: Susie Sharp
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Susie Sharp / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: North Carolina Supreme Court, Spring Term, 1968. Composite of portraits by Waller Studio.
context_page_description: Susie Marshall Sharp was an American jurist who served as the first female chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. She was not the first woman to head the highest court in a U.S. state, but is believed to be the first woman elected to such a post in a state, like North Carolina, in which the position is elected by the people separately from that of Associate Justice. In 1965, Lorna E. Lockwood became the first female chief justice of a state supreme court, but in Arizona, the Supreme Court justices elect their chief justice.
context_section_description: In 1949, Governor Kerr Scott appointed her a state Superior Court judge, making her the first female judge in the history of the state. After Sharp became a Superior Court judge, Tom Bost of the Greensboro Daily News questioned "what would happen if Sharp was faced with trying a case of rape? Wouldn't that be too much for a woman?" Judge Sharp wrote back that "In the first place, there could have been no rape had not a woman been present, and I consider it eminently fitting that one be in on the 'pay-off'."
  While holding court as a Superior Court judge in Burke County, North Carolina, county commissioners refused, upon learning of her assignment to their county, to modify the only bathroom facilities in the judge's chambers; a sink and a urinal that hung on the wall. Judge Sharp opened court on Monday morning at 10:00 a.m. and ordered the sheriff to "invite" the county commissioners over to the courthouse. By 11:00, the courthouse was aflutter with the scurrying about of plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, while the county commissioners narrowly avoided a few nights' repose in the county jail.
  Judge Sharp was re-appointed by successive governors, and in 1962, Governor Terry Sanford made Sharp the first female Associate Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Justice Sharp was elected by the people that November and again in November 1966 to a full eight-year term. In 1974, voters gave her 74 percent of the vote to elect her Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, succeeding her close friend, Chief Justice William H. Bobbitt.
  Time, in its January 6, 1976 cover story, named Sharp one of the 12 "women of the year" for 1975. In so doing, Time called her a "trail blazer" with a "reputation as both a compassionate jurist and an incisive legal scholar".
  Senator Sam Ervin, a fellow Democrat, recommended to President Richard Nixon that he appoint her to the United States Supreme Court. Nixon declined the advice, and a woman would not be appointed to the Court until Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981.
  During Justice Sharp's 17-year tenure on the Supreme Court, she wrote 459 majority opinions, 124 concurring opinions, and 45 dissenting opinions.
caption: Justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Spring Term, 1968. Sharp's portrait is at the far left.
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