With a little ingenuity, a situation of "necessity" can occasionally be avoided. Thus in a case in which all the members of the Teas Supreme Court were Woodmen of the World and hence the entire court vas disqualified in a case involving that group, the Governor appointed a special court of three women. For the resultant three opinions see Johnson v. Darr, 144 Tex. 516, 272 S. W. 1098 (1925).A quick Google search revealed that Frank was not the only one to have noticed this case. Alice G. McAfee published an article on the subject in the St. Mary's Law Journal in 2008, arguing that the sitting was more than simply a "bizarre" one-off, as most commenters had depicted it, and fit with broader trends of women's movement in Texas and the legal profession at the time. There's also a post on the case on the online handbook of Texas history. One fact that underscores the case's early date: the temporary Chief Justice in the case, Hortense Ward, was the first woman ever to be admitted to the bar in Texas--in 1910.
Hortense Sparks Ward.
First Woman Admitted to the Texas Bar
& Chief Justice in Johnson v. Darr.
Photo Courtesy of Texas Bar Blog.
This is well outside my area of expertise, so I'm not quite sure what to make of the case. Although it is one of those odd anecdotes that make for entertaining but not very serious historical works, I agree with McAfee that there are likely significant legal historical implications here--depictions of female lawyers as more "disinterested" than their male counterparts, a moment of opening at the end of suffrage era before women's roles became more circumscribed (as McAfee stresses), etc. I suspect there may be still more to mine from this incident, and I hope someone more qualified than I can further redeem the case from the bin of assorted historical oddities.
