The All-Woman Texas Supreme Court of 1925

For a few months in 1925, the Supreme Court of Texas was made up entirely of women. Not the regular court. A special court of three, appointed to decide a single case that none of the sitting justices could hear.

Texas women had won the vote only a few years earlier. They would not be allowed to serve on a Texas jury for another twenty-nine.

The case nobody could hear

The dispute was ordinary. Trustees of the Woodmen of the World, a fraternal insurance society, had conveyed two tracts of land in El Paso to a trustee by a deed that looked absolute on its face. The trustee's creditors attached the land before the paper declaring the trust was ever recorded. The question was whether that unrecorded trust declaration could stand against the attaching creditors. Johnson v. Darr, 114 Tex. 516 (1925).

The problem was the parties, not the law. The Woodmen of the World was a male-only order with a large political membership, and in 1924, when the case reached the Supreme Court, all three justices were members. Under state law that disqualified them. Beginning in March 1924, Governor Pat M. Neff set out to find substitutes and found that the lawyers he approached were Woodmen too. Supreme Court of Texas: The All-Woman Supreme Court.

The court at the time had only three members. The nine-justice bench Texas has today dates from a 1945 constitutional amendment; see How Many Justices Are on the Texas Supreme Court?

Three appointments, then a reshuffle

Neff's solution was to appoint women, who could not be Woodmen. On January 1, 1925, shortly before his term ended, he named Nellie Robertson of Granbury as special chief justice and Edith Wilmans of Dallas and Hortense Ward of Houston as special associate justices, and set the first hearing for a week later. He had not checked that each appointee met the state constitution's requirement of seven years of legal practice. After what the court's own history calls "several resignations and reappointments," the bench was finalized the day before that first hearing: Hortense Sparks Ward as special chief justice, with Ruth Virginia Brazzil of Galveston and Hattie Leah Henenberg of Dallas as special associate justices. Supreme Court of Texas: The All-Woman Supreme Court; Handbook of Texas: All-Woman Supreme Court.

• Hortense Sparks Ward (1872–1944) passed the bar examination in 1910 and was one of the first women licensed to practice law in Texas, after Edith Locke in 1902 and Alice Tiernan in 1909. She practiced in Houston with her husband, worked for passage of the Married Woman's Property Law of 1913, and in 1915 became the first Texas woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Handbook of Texas: Hortense Sparks Ward.
• Ruth Virginia Brazzil (1889–1976) was admitted to the Texas bar in 1912 and worked in Galveston as an officer of the American National Life Insurance Company. Neff located her just before the court convened; unlike the women originally nominated for her seat, she had the required seven years of experience. She later married, kept the name Roome, and apparently gave up the law for the Hill Country. Handbook of Texas: Ruth Brazzil Roome.
• Hattie Leah Henenberg (1893–1974) studied at the Dallas Law School, joined the bar in 1916, and in 1924–25 supervised the Dallas Bar Association's free legal aid bureau. She went on to serve as an assistant attorney general of Texas and, in the 1940s, as a Dallas County assistant district attorney. Handbook of Texas: Hattie Henenberg.

What the court did

The special court met in the Capitol on January 8, 1925, reviewed procedure with the regular court's chief justice, C. M. Cureton, and took up whether to grant the writ of error. Oral argument was set for January 30. Supreme Court of Texas: The All-Woman Supreme Court.

On May 23, 1925, the court announced its decision. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Ward held that the instrument creating the trust was not one the registration statute required to be recorded, so the creditors' attachment lien did not reach the Woodmen's title. The court affirmed the El Paso Court of Civil Appeals, which had reversed the trial court and awarded both tracts to the Woodmen trustees. Justices Brazzil and Henenberg each filed concurring opinions. Johnson v. Darr, 114 Tex. 516, 272 S.W. 1098 (1925).

That was the whole docket. The special court existed for one case, sat from January to May 1925, and did not hear another. The Supreme Court of Texas describes it as "believed to have been the only such court to exist in the country." Whether it was the first anywhere has not been firmly established. Supreme Court of Texas: The All-Woman Supreme Court.

Twenty-nine years before a jury

The three women could decide a case for the state's highest civil court, but none of them could have sat on the jury that tried it. Texas did not open jury service to women until voters adopted a constitutional amendment, proposed as H.J.R. 16 of the 53rd Legislature, on November 2, 1954. The Handbook of Texas records 1954 as the first year Texas women served on juries. Legislative Reference Library of Texas: November 2, 1954 amendment election; Handbook of Texas: Women and the Law.

It took longer still for a woman to hold a regular seat. The first was Ruby Kless Sondock, appointed by Governor William Clements to fill an unexpired term and sworn in on June 25, 1982. Supreme Court of Texas: Court History.

Where this sits in today's court system

The Supreme Court of Texas is still the state's court of last resort for civil and juvenile cases, now with a chief justice and eight justices, each elected statewide. This is the bench right now:

This table is live data. It is generated from the same court records that power the rest of Referlex, so it reflects the current bench rather than the day this article was written.

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