Lelia Josephine Robinson (July 23, 1850 – August 10, 1891) was the first woman to be admitted to the bar and practice in the courts of Massachusetts in 1882. Early life Lelia J. Robinson was born on July 23, 1850 to a white, middle-class family in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were Mary and Daniel Robinson. Robinson married Rupert J. Chute at seventeen years old, after completing her public education. She worked as a journalist in Boston, writing for the Boston Globe, the Boston Post, and the Boston Times. She also worked in Berlin as a foreign correspondent. After Robinson divorced her husband in 1877 for adultery, the only acceptable grounds for divorce at that time, she decided to pursue a legal career in effort to support herself at the age of twenty-eight. Education Robinson enrolled as a student at Boston University School of Law in October 1879, the only woman in a class of 150. Other women had enrolled as law students at Boston University before Robinson, but all of them failed to complete their legal education. She was the first woman to graduate from Boston University School of Law, in June 1881. She graduated, cum laude, as number four in her class out of 32 students. Admittance to the bar After graduating from law school, Robinson was denied admission to the Massachusetts Bar in Suffolk County in June 1881 by Chief Justice Horace Gray. Robinson took up the matter with the Supreme Court of Massachusetts which allowed her to draft a brief in support of her argument in favor of women practicing law. The Massachusetts Supreme Court then determined prior that women could not be lawyers, despite no language in the Massachusetts constitution to the contrary. The court reasoned that, while attorneys were public officers, they were close enough to make the court pause. The only offices women were traditionally allowed to hold at common law were overseer of the poor and queen, so the court decided to defer to the Massachusetts legislature on the issue of allowing women to practice law. While waiting for her admittance to the bar, Robinson had her own legal business with male lawyers to conduct her cases in the court. She was not even permitted to present her oral argument for bar admittance on her own behalf. There was a general fear in the late nineteenth century that allowing a woman to practice