Blazing a trail: First woman allowed to argue U.S. Supreme Court cases.

Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood’s interest in law and politics brought her from upstate New York to Washington, D.C., in 1866. Later that year, she opened her own seminary school for women and became part of a community of progressive women activists who participated in the temperance and suffrage movements.

In 1871, fifteen women, including Lockwood, enrolled at the National University Law School (now part of George Washington University) in Washington, D.C. The following year, Lockwood and another woman completed the program, after which law school administrators told them they would not receive diplomas. Lockwood appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, who was chancellor ex officio of the National University, demanding the university recognize her coursework with the diploma she said had been promised.

SIR,

You are, or you are not, President of the National University Law School. If you are..., I desire to say to you that I have passed through the curriculum of study in this school, and am entitled to, and demand, my diploma. If you are not its President,... take your name from its papers, and not hold out to the world to be what you are not.

Very respectfully, Belva A. Lockwood

There is no record of Grant replying, but Lockwood must have been persuasive. She received her diploma one week later.

Could women lawyers argue cases in state court?

In most circumstances, state courts didn’t allow women lawyers to argue cases at the state-court level.

Myra Colby Bradwell, a recent law school graduate, was denied entry to the Illinois bar based on her legal status as a woman. The aspiring lawyer asked the Supreme Court of the United States to intervene.

In Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1872), the Supreme Court confirmed the ability of Illinois to block women from its state bar. In its decision, the Court declared that the federal protections of the recently ratified 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution did not override the individual states’ regulation of their own state bars or protect women’s rights to practice a profession.

Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, citing the recent Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), said the 14th Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause didn’t apply to the ability of a state to regulate its own conduct. "The right to control and regulate the granting of license to practice law in the courts of a state is one of those powers which are not transferred for its protection to the federal government," Miller said.

Justice Joseph Philo Bradley’s concurring opinion went much farther, stating that women weren’t fit to argue Supreme Court cases or even become lawyers. "Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life[.] . . . The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator."

Could women lawyers argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court?

Albert G. Riddle, a Washington lawyer, supporter of women’s rights, and former Ohio congressperson, moved Belva Lockwood for admission to the U.S. Supreme Court Bar in October 1876. Riddle’s motion was denied, Lockwood’s application rejected.

In explaining the denial, Chief Justice Morrison Remick. 'Mott' Waite curtly replied "By the uniform practice of the [Supreme] Court from its organization to the present time, and by the fair construction of its rules, none but men are admitted to practice before [the Court] as attorneys and counselors[.]" The Chief Justice added the Court wouldn’t change its mind unless "required by statute."

Undaunted and motivated by the high court’s reasoning and this legal setback, Lockwood championed her cause by lobbying Congress and former President Ulysses Grant for a law that would force the Supreme Court to recognize the right of women to appear before it.

Nevertheless, she persisted. In January 1877, "[a] bill to relieve the legal disabilities of women," (H.R. 4435), was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This bill died in the House, yet Lockwood persisted. On February 21, 1878, a "bill to relieve certain legal disabilities of women" passed in the House.

Lockwood then diverted her efforts to the U.S. Senate spending the next year collecting petition signatures from lawyers, campaigning in the press, and meeting with individual Senators. Finally, the Senate brought the bill to debate on the floor where Lockwood’s allies rallied to defend it. Finally, the Senate passed the measure and on February 15, 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed it into law.

The "Act to relieve certain legal disabilities of women," popularly known as the "Lockwood Bill," read as follows:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any woman who shall have been a member of the bar of the highest court of any State or Territory or of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia for the space of three years, and shall have maintained a good standing before such court, and who shall be a person of good moral character, shall, on motion, and the production of such record, be admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.

On March 3, 1879, Riddle again moved Lockwood’s admission to the highest court in the land, and, this time, the Supreme Court admitted her.

May it please the court: Kaiser v. Stickney (1880).

Kaiser v. Stickney, 102 U.S. 176 (1880), provided the opportunity for Lockwood’s first oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, a quiet but historic appearance marking the first time that a woman member of the bar participated in argument.

The case involved a $16,000 debt owed by Caroline Kaiser. Ironically, Lockwood and co-counsel cited the legal doctrine of coverture — where a married woman was considered to be under her husband’s legal protection and control — to assert that Kaiser didn’t have to pay the money owed. Although Kaiser lost her case, Lockwood made history.

Despite this loss, Lockwood returned to the Supreme Court in 1906, at the age of seventy-six, representing the Eastern and Emigrant Cherokees.

May it please the court: U.S. v. Cherokee Nation (1906).

Lockwood’s most famous argument was in U.S. v. Cherokee Nation, 202 U.S. 101 (1906), which brought her before the Supreme Court a second time. Lockwood represented the Cherokee Nation, which sought full payment from the federal government under an 1835 treaty in which the tribe had ceded land in Georgia to the federal government for $1 million. The government had not paid in full. The lower court ordered the government to pay the balance owed, and the government appealed to the Supreme Court. Lockwood convincingly argued, and the Court agreed, to uphold the judgment for the money owed, with interest, to the Cherokee Nation. The result was a $5 million dollar payment, one of the largest made to that date to a Native American tribe for land ceded to the government.

The second woman to argue before the Supreme Court.

After Lockwood made history as the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court of the United States, another woman would not argue before the high court until Eliza 'Lyda' Burton Conley, a Wyandot-American lawyer, brought Conley v. Ballinger, 216 U.S. 84 (1910). before the Court.

Nevertheless, she persisted. Throughout her dramatic career, Lockwood persistently kept issues of women’s rights in the public and political spotlight. In addition to admittance to the U.S. Supreme Court bar, Lockwood lobbied Congress to establish equitable pay grades for female federal government workers, ran twice as a nominee for President of the United States.

"I have been now fourteen years before the bar, in an almost continuous practice, and my experience has been large, often serious, and many times amusing. I have never lacked plenty of good paying work; but, while I have supported my family well, I have not grown rich. In business I have been patient, painstaking, and indefatigable. There is no class of case that comes before the court that I have not ventured to try . . . either civil, equitable, or criminal; and my clients have been as largely men as women. There is a good opening at the bar for the class of women who have taste and tact for it." — Belva A. Lockwood, 1888"