Judge Susie Sharp's torrid love life

The hottest story in town has nothing to do with John Edward's affair or Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy.

It's Anna Ragland Hayes' new book about former N.C. Chief Justice Susie Sharp and her long-term love affairs with married lawyers over the years -- including a law professor at Chapel Hill, a Salisbury lawyer, a Reidsville judge and, late in life, with Charlotte's William Bobbitt, by then a widower and fellow justice of the Supreme Court. Bobbitt was my grandmother's first cousin, and after they stopped by my parents' house for a visit in the 1960s, she always wondered if Billy Bobbitt and Susie Sharp were pondering marriage.

They weren't, reports Hayes in this carefully-researched book. They both knew that marriage wasn't possible between colleagues on the high court -- and in any case, Susie Sharp was not particularly interested in marriage. It was a complication that would just get in the way of her professional life.

But as Hayes makes clear in "Without Precedent: The Life of Suse Marshall Sharp," available this month from UNC Press, she was quite interested in men and evidently had a long and varied love life.

Susie Sharp was a fascinating woman who had a distinguished career in the law and on the bench. She was a trail-blazing lawyer, a lifelong Democrat whom Jesse Helms once recommended for the U.S. Supreme Court.

There's more to come about this fascinating account of the nation's first woman to be chief justice of a state supreme court.

And John Edwards? Bristol Palin? Old news.