Susan B. Anthony — U.S. Vs Susan Anthony

In 1872 a woman walked into a polling booth in Rochester, New York, cast a vote for President, and was arrested for it seventeen days later. She was not allowed to explain herself to the jury that convicted her. Yet the speech she gave on her own defence, delivered to the people of Monroe County before that jury ever sat, is still taught as one of the sharpest short arguments in the English language for why a right does not stop being a right just because a legislature has not yet written it down.

In two minutes

Susan B. Anthony was prosecuted in United States v. Susan B. Anthony for voting as a woman in the 1872 U.S. presidential election, and her defence — that the Fourteenth Amendment already made her a citizen, and citizenship already carried the vote — was legally sound and still lost, because the judge decided the case before the trial began.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.