Holy Barrister

"Sister Ann Joachim," said Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes of the U.S. Supreme Court one day last week, "you may pass to the clerk's desk and take the oath." While 25 nuns stirred in the red-cushioned seats of the Supreme Court chamber, a tall, bespectacled woman in the black cloak, black veil and white wimple of a Dominican, swished to the clerk's desk to become the first Catholic Sister ever admitted to practice before the highest court in the land.

Sister Ann, christened Petronilla Joachim in Cologne, Germany 34 years ago and still called "Pet" by her intimates, entered the Dominican novitiate in Adrian, Mich, in 1928. To this practical teaching order she brought a talent such as Mother Church long ago welcomed in pioneer feminists like St. Teresa, bustling convent-builder. Petronilla Joachim, taken to Detroit in childhood, had gone to Detroit College of Law, taken an M. A. degree at the University of Detroit in 1924, hung out her shingle as a trial lawyer. Six feet tall, she played hard-driving tennis, won eleven trophies. Lawyer Joachim also took up flying, needed only one more lesson to obtain a pilot's license when she grounded her plane, donned the Dominican habit.

As Sister Ann, this twinkling-eyed nun taught at a Chicago parochial school where she coached the boys in baseball, the girls in basketball. In a reserved space on her classroom blackboard she kept her motto in chalk: ALWAYS LEAD, NEVER FOLLOW, with three airplanes drawn underneath. Obtaining more degrees at St. Joseph's College and Academy in Adrian and Loyola University in Chicago, Sister Ann went two years ago to Fribourg in Switzerland where she earned a doctorate with a thesis comparing the U. S. and Swiss constitutions.

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