Susie Marshall Sharp (1907–1996) was the first female judge in North Carolina, the first female justice to sit on the North Carolina supreme court, and the first female chief judge of that court. Anna Hayes's well-researched biography takes the reader from Sharp's childhood, through her career, to her death.

Sharp's father was an attorney and an elected official and had a great deal of influence over her. By high school, Susie knew that she wanted to be a lawyer. In 1926, after attending the North Carolina College for Women for two years, she enrolled in the School of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The UNC law school had been admitting women since 1911, but only three women graduated between 1911 and 1926. Indicative of how Sharp dealt with many issues, she later denied any difficulty as the only female law student in her class, claiming that being a woman did not harm her but only forced her to work harder.

Upon graduation, Sharp joined her father's practice. Eventually she earned a sterling reputation as a trial lawyer, and following her father's lead became actively involved in state Democratic Party politics. When William Scott Kerr, a “populist” candidate for governor ran for office, he invited Sharp to become a county campaign manager. In part, in recognition of her work and the role that women played in electing Kerr, he appointed Sharp a special superior court judge in 1949. The life of a special judge was anything but easy as she literally rode circuit, substituting for other trial judges throughout the state. Sharp did this for thirteen years, presiding over a wide variety of trials. In 1962 the governor appointed her to the supreme court. She eventually was elected as chief judge. During her tenure on the supreme court, which ended in 1979, Sharp produced over 600 opinions, and she used her position to advocate for prison reform, court reform, and enhanced judicial ethics. Hayes also makes a compelling case that Sharp was a contender for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Answering the question of why Sharp was able to achieve such success, Hayes writes, “Part of it undoubtedly was her demeanor as a woman in charge but without a chip on her shoulder. Her training as a southern lady equipped her with useful antennae and techniques to avoid bruising male echoes. But most important was her indispensable knowledge of the law” (155). This unfortunately is not a particularly compelling answer.

To the outside world, Sharp appeared not to have any “intimate entanglements”(156). Yet after graduation from law school, Sharp began a decades-long affair with a married former professor. She also conducted two other longtime affairs, all with prominent married men who functioned as her advisers and supporters. Even more shocking, Sharp was extraordinarily close with her lover's families. Hayes raises, but perhaps too quickly dismisses, the possibility that Sharp might have been motivated to enter into these affairs by ambition. Although the biography implicitly plays off the contradiction between Sharp's performance of southern womanhood and these three affairs, the reader never entirely grasps Sharp's motivations and what they meant. We are simply left to marvel at the contradiction. Yet perhaps in the same way in which Sharp usurped male power in the public sphere, she usurped male sexual prerogatives as well.

Sharp's position on women's rights eventually would earn her the animus of many feminists. In the 1940s, Sharp fought for the right of women to sit on juries. She also spent a great deal of time advocating for women in the professions. Yet she was adamant that women could not marry and have a legal career. Sharp also vigorously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, convinced that it would remove protections for women and that fundamental differences existed between men and women. She does not seem to have mentored any female lawyers. In fact, even when she had power to appoint women, she often did not.

Sharp was also a segregationist who despised the civil rights movement. Despite Sharp's strongly held beliefs, when confronted with a case involving the desegregation of a Charlotte municipal golf course in 1956, she followed U.S. Supreme Court precedent requiring desegregation. Likewise, in 1966, she issued an opinion reconfirming that schools could not be segregated. Yet in private correspondence, Sharp described African American defendants as “animals” (198). Hayes interprets Sharp's desegregation decisions as reflecting her deep commitment to the rule of law. She further writes that Sharp generally was not “compelled to wrestle with the race issue, because civil rights litigation was handled in federal court” (199). Such a statement is troubling for it assumes that race was not an issue in the mundane cases that courts hear everyday. Moreover, prison reform, an issue that Sharp adamantly supported, was fraught with race, as was her support for maintaining the death penalty for rape. One wishes that Hayes had employed a more nuanced analysis of race, class, gender and sexuality. Without Precedent is long on carefully researched details but short on analysis.