Background

Annette Abbott Adams was born on March 12, 1877 in Prattville, California, United States, the daughter of Hiram Brown Abbott, a merchant, and Annette Frances Stubbs.

Education

In 1897 Adams graduated from the California State Normal School at Chico. She received the bachelor of law from the University of California at Berkeley in 1904.

Adams returned to the University of California in 1910 and received the doctor of jurisprudence degree in 1912.

Career

Adams taught in California secondary schools for five years. In 1907 Adams moved to educational administration and headed the Modoc County High School at Alturas.

In 1912 she was admitted to the California bar. Determined that the field of the law should not remain an all-male domain, she pioneered in the formation of an all-woman law firm by entering into a San Francisco partnership with Marguerite Ogden in 1913.

President Woodrow Wilson appointed her assistant United States attorney for the Northern District of California in 1914. During her four-year tenure as assistant United States attorney for the Northern District of California, she secured the conviction of associates of the German consulate in San Francisco who had collaborated to use the United States as a base to launch military expeditions against England. These activities had contributed to the precarious position of American neutrality in the months before the United States entered World War I.

On July 25, 1918, Wilson appointed Adams United States attorney for the Northern District of California.

On June 26, 1920, she became assistant attorney general, a position she held until August 1921, when she was replaced by a Harding appointee.

Adams returned to private law practice in San Francisco in 1921. During the 1920s she argued a number of extremely complicated water rights cases at a time when ranchers and power companies were in deep dispute over California's limited water supply.

In 1932 Adams campaigned hard for the election of Franklin Roosevelt as president, heading a committee of women lawyers supporting him. The Democratic victory brought with it an intense effort led by Mary Williams Dewson, head of the Women's Division of the National Committee, to appoint more women to federal office. Dewson sought to persuade Roosevelt to surpass the record of his five immediate predecessors, who had appointed only twelve women in twenty-four years.

In 1935 Roosevelt, perhaps as a result of Dewson's lobbying, selected Adams as a special assistant counsel to Attorney General Homer Cummings. She worked especially in the area of oil litigation cases, in which she applied her experience with the California natural resources suits.

Although Adams was successful in her work at the Justice Department, she was most interested in receiving an appointment to the federal bench for the Northern District of California. However, "the difficulties of appointing a woman" constituted a sufficient reason for the Democratic party male leadership to oppose her nomination to this post. Instead of confronting the party's opposition, Roosevelt, on July 22, 1940, appointed Adams special assistant to the U. S. attorney general in conducting proceedings to condemn Terminal Island in Los Angeles for use by the United States Navy. She resigned this post on September 30, 1941.

Six months later Adams secured judicial appointment, but at the state rather than the federal level. California Governor Culbert L. Olson named her presiding judge of the Court of Appeals for the Third District of California in Sacramento.

On November 3, 1942, California voters elected Adams to a twelve-year term on the appellate court. She held the judgeship for ten years, retiring on November 30, 1952. She died in Sacramento, California.

Achievements

• Adams became one of the first women high school principals in California when she headed the Modoc County High School at Alturas. She was the first woman in the nation's history to hold the post of United States attorney for the Northern District of California and the first woman assistant attorney general. She was also the first woman to be appointed presiding judge of the Court of Appeals for the Third District of California in Sacramento. She argued successfully the government's position in Dillon v. Gloss, in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the validity of the Volstead Act and the constitutionality of the ratification procedures of the Eighteenth Amendment. In several cases before the California Supreme Court she established a foundation for the riparian rights of plaintiffs for the use of water adjacent to their lands. She was successful in recovering for the government the lands in the Naval Oil Reserve in Kern County, California--territory which had been involved in the Elk Hills scandal of the 1920's.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Interstate Transit Co v. Rogers U.S. Supreme Court Transcript of Record with Supporting Pleadings

    (The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)

  • Baldini v. U S U.S. Supreme Court Transcript of Record with Supporting Pleadings

    (The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)

  • Kaneda v. U S U.S. Supreme Court Transcript of Record with Supporting Pleadings

    (The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)

Connections

On August 13, 1906, she married Martin H. Adams; they had no children.

Father:

Hiram Brown Abbott

Mother:

Annette Frances (Stubbs) Abbott

Spouse:

Martin H. Adams

References

• Encyclopedia of Women in the American West