by allowing the representation of all classes of the people in
courts of justice.

2. To allow women to practice at the bar as attorneys is only to
secure to the people the right to select their own counsel. It is
to give the women of Massachusetts the opportunity of consulting
members of their own sex for that advice and assistance which
none but authorized attorneys and counsellors are legally
qualified to give.

3. To exclude women from the bar would be to do an injustice to
the community, in preventing free and wholesome competition of
existing talent, and to do still greater injustice to those women
who are qualified for the profession, by shutting them out from
an honorable and remunerative means of gaining a livelihood.

4. To exclude women from the bar because there are certain
departments of the profession which are peculiarly ill-adapted to
their sex and nature, would be to assume arbitrarily that, with
entire lack of judgment or discretion, modesty or policy, they
would seek or accept such business; and to close to them those
avenues of the profession for which they are generally admitted
to be eminently well adapted, for such a reason, and upon such an
assumption, would be so grossly unjust that no argument can be
based on such an impossible contingency.

Your applicant, having faithfully and diligently pursued the
study of law for three years, being a graduate of the Boston
University Law School, and having complied with the other
requirements of the statute and the rules of court upon the
subject, respectfully prays that her petition for examination,
which was duly filed, may be favorably considered, and that it be
included in the general notice to the Board of Examiners of
Suffolk county. LELIA JOSEPHINE ROBINSON.

The opinion given by the Supreme Judicial Court, so far as it
relates to the main point at issue, is as follows:

The question presented by this petition and by the report on
which it has been reserved for our determination, is whether,
under the laws of the commonwealth, an unmarried woman is
entitled to be examined for admission as an attorney and
counsellor of this Court. This being the first application of the
kind in Massachusetts, the Court, desirous that it might be fully
argued, informed the executive