Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Now, Mr. President, this bill is not a bill merely to admit women
to the privilege of engaging in a particular profession; it is a
bill to secure to the citizen of the United States the right to
select his counsel, and that is all. At present a case is tried
and decided in the State courts of any State of this Union which
may be removed to the Supreme Court of the United States. In the
courts of the State, women are permitted to practice as
advocates, and a woman has been the advocate under whose
direction and care and advocacy the case has been won in the
court below. Is it tolerable that the counsel who has attended
the case from its commencement to its successful termination in
the highest court of the State should not be permitted to attend
upon and defend the rights of that client when the case is
transferred to the Supreme Court of the United States? Everybody
knows, at least every lawyer of experience knows, the
impossibility of transferring with justice to the interests of a
client, a cause from one counsel to another. A suit is instituted
under the advice of a counsel on a certain theory, a certain
remedy is selected, a certain theory of the cause is the one on
which it is staked. Now that must be attended to and defended by
the counsel under whose advice the suit has taken its shape; the
pleadings have been shaped in the courts below.
Under the present system, a citizen of any State in the Union
having selected a counsel of good moral character who has
practiced three years, who possesses all-sufficient professional
and personal qualifications, and having had a cause brought to a
successful result in the State court, is denied by the present
existing and unjust rule having counsel of his choice argue the
cause in the Supreme Court of the United States.
The greatest master of human manners, who read the human heart
and who understood better than any man who ever lived the
varieties of human character, when he desired to solve just what
had puzzled the lawyers and doctors, placed a woman upon the
judgment seat; and yet, under the present existing law, if Portia
herself were alive, she could not defend the opinion she had
given, before the Supreme Court of the United States.
The press commented favorably upon this new point gained for women.
We give a few extracts:
The senators who voted to-day against the bill "to relieve
certain legal disabilities of women" are marked men and have
reason to fear the result of their action.--[Telegraph to the New
York _Tribune_, February 7.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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