BOO KS
Legal Affairs:The Remarkable Susie Sharp ’ 29
Susie Sharp is known to many North
Carolinians as a symbol of progress
for women. Born in 1907, she graduated from the UNC law school in 1929, a
time when women in North Carolina
were not allowed even to serve on juries.
She moved from one “first” to another —
first female city attorney in North Carolina
in 1939, first female Superior Court judge
in 1949, first female justice of the state
Supreme Court in 1962 and first female
elected chief justice of any state Supreme
Court in 1974.
Her colleagues, friends and the public
knew her as a devoted public servant, intolerant of judicial misconduct, determined
and able to tell a good story. She was a
woman who had sacrificed the possibility of
marriage and a family to her career. Her
public life and persona were seemingly so
well-known, no one bothered to write her
comprehensive biography — until Anna
Hayes ’ 88 (JD).
In 1994, Hayes,
then a partner in the
Raleigh law firm of
Manning Fulton, was
struck with the
notion that a biogra-
phy of Susie Sharp
“was a project beg-
ging to be done.”
Hayes devoted the
next 14 years to
researching and writ-
ing Without Prece-
dent: The Life of Susie
Marshall Sharp. She
has produced, in the
words of Sharp’s col-
league and former
Chief Justice Jim
Exum Jr. ’ 57, “a
remarkable book
about a remarkable
woman — an honestly written, well-docu-
mented account of the groundbreaking life
of Susie Sharp.”
Drawing on her research and analytical
skills as a lawyer, Hayes has chronicled the
family and community into which Sharp
What was
unknown until
this biography is
that Sharp had
three long-term
and sometimes
concurrent affairs
with married
men. All three
were lawyers,
supportive of her
and her career
throughout
her life.
SARAH MCCARTY ARNESON ’ 96
was born, her success in law school, the
challenges she faced as the only female
lawyer in a small town in the South, and
the political and legal savvy that, along with
luck, propelled her to the top of North
Carolina’s legal community. Hayes discusses
Sharp’s successes but pulls no punches in
addressing her controversial stances, such as
Sharp’s vigorous opposition to the Equal
Rights Amendment for women.
Hayes also discloses aspects of Susie
Sharp’s personal life unknown even to her
closest friends and colleagues.
Sharp’s special friendship with former
Chief Justice William H. Bobbitt ’ 21, with
whom she served on the court, is well-known. Approximately five years after she
joined the court, Sharp and Bobbitt, a widower, became an inseparable couple who
Author Anna Hayes
’ 88 (JD) discovered
that “it pained Susie
Sharp to discard anything.” Sharp’s siblings turned over to
Hayes “mountains of
material” from the
family home place,
her old law practice
and, after Sharp died
in 1996, from her
apartment. Among
the documents were
letters, journals, and
notebooks in shorthand that disclosed
her romantic life.
