TEXAS SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

presence of women on the high court. 15Barbara Culver, a Southern Methodist University law graduate, was appointed to a position on the supremecourt in 1988 after serving as a state district judge for ten years. Her tenure was also brief—only ten months—butit confirmed that women were certainly competent to sit on the state’s highest court. 16Not until 1992, however, was a woman elected to a six-year term on the Texas Supreme Court. RoseSpector, a St. Mary’s graduate from San Antonio, took her seat after serving as both a judge of a county court atlaw and of a state district court in Bexar County. 17In 1995 Priscilla Owen joined Justice Spector on the high court. A graduate of Baylor’s law school, Owenhad practiced commercial litigation for seventeen years in the Houston firm of Andrews Kurth, where she wasa partner. She was reelected to the supreme court in 2000, but left in 2005 when her appointment by PresidentGeorge W. Bush to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was confirmed. 18In 1997 Deborah Hankinson was appointed by Bush, then governor of Texas, to the high court. Hankinson’sfirst career was as a teacher in the public schools, where she initiated curriculum and established resources to makespecial education more accessible to those students who needed it. Realizing that the law could impact educationin a positive way, Hankinson entered SMU law school. After graduating she joined the firm of Thompson andKnight in Dallas. In 1995 Hankinson was appointed to the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals and two years later to theTexas Supreme Court, where she became the third woman justice. 19Harriet O’Neill was elected to the court in 1998 and reelected to a second term in 2004. O’Neill’s judicialcareer began when she was elected to a district court in Harris County. She then served on the Fourteenth Courtof Appeals. A graduate of the University of South Carolina School of Law, O’Neill practiced law in Houston,concentrating primarily in complex business and commercial litigation before opening her own office to focus onmediating legal disputes. Justice O’Neill’s term extend[ed] through 2010. 20This remains an interesting question—will she be joined by other women justices while she is on thecourt? Only nine women have served on the Texas Supreme Court in its 171-year history. It appears that the sameglass ceiling that a woman faces in becoming managing partner of a firm or dean of a law school exists on Texas’highest court as well.On a more positive note, women fill many judicial positions in the state today although their access to thejudiciary was slow in the beginning. The first woman to run for a judicial seat in Texas was Hortense Ward. In1920 she presented herself as a candidate for a Harris County court position. Her campaign slogan was, “Don’tvote for me because I am a woman but don’t vote against me because I am a woman:’ 21 Ward, obviously, feltqualified for a judicial position, but she realized that gender was an issue in the race, which she lost. Even though15Texas Bar Journal, 61, 1:87.16Texas Bar Journal, 37, 5:423.17Jay Brandon, Law and Liberty: A History of the Legal Profession in San Antonio (Dallas: Taylor Pub. Co. with the San Antonio BarAss’n, 1996), 86-87.18Justice Priscilla Owen, Texas Judiciary Online (accessed March 29, 2005).19Kelley Jones King, “A Judicial Profile: Texas State Supreme Court Justice Deborah Hankinson,” http://www.texasbar.com (accessedMarch 28, 2005).20Justice Harriet O’Neill, Texas Judiciary Online (accessed March 29, 2005).21Houston Press (July 1, 1920), 2.79