Sarah Hughes

“The Vice-President wants you to swear him in as President. Can you do it? How soon can you get to the airport?” the U.S. attorney told Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes.

“Of course I could, and I could be there in ten minutes,” she later wrote.

Hughes then headed to Love Field in Dallas, where she became the first and, so far, the only woman to swear in a president, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

She would later say that at the time she was thinking about “first of all that I must not think about Kennedy; I must think about the country going on.”

Hughes’s legal career and advocacy had lasting effects beyond the swearing-in.

She was part of a three-judge panel that overturned Texas’s abortion law in Roe v. Wade. The decision, which she wrote, was later upheld by the Supreme Court in the landmark case that established abortion rights in the U.S.

“The Texas Abortion Law is unconstitutional for vagueness and overbreadth,” she wrote in 1970. “We need not here delineate the factors which could qualify the right of a mother to have an abortion. It is sufficient to state that legislation concerning abortion must address itself to more than a bare negation of that right.”

Hughes advocated for allowing women to serve on juries, which was not permitted in Texas until 1954.

During the course of her career, Hughes served in the Texas state House of Representatives and served as both a state and federal judge. She also worked as a police officer in Washington, D.C., while in law school.

— Rachel Frazin