By Dan McCue

For Jean Hoefer Toal, South Carolina’s glass-ceiling-breaking chief justice, the “firsts” keep on coming.

The first woman and first Roman Catholic to serve as chief justice of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, Toal was recently named chairwoman of the National Center for State Courts board of directors.

The center, headquartered in Williamsburg, Va., is a nonprofit court-reform organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice through continuing education, advanced and on-site training initiatives and expanding the implementation of the latest technological innovations in the nation’s courts.

Toal was also named president of the Conference of Chief Justices, which represents the top judges of the 50 states and U.S. territories, and for which the national center leaders serve as executive staff.

Both appointments are to one-year terms. South Carolina had never before had a chief justice serve as the head of these organizations.

“Who’d have ever dreamed that this would come to pass?” the self-effacing chief justice said.

Attorney Edward W. Mullins Jr., senior partner and chairman emeritus of the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough law firm, described Toal as “nationally recognized and highly respected by the chief justices of the other states.

“To be elected board chair of the center and president of the Joint Conference of the Chief Justices is a huge honor for both her and the state of South Carolina,” said Mullins, who was also elected to the national center’s board, the first private-practice attorney to be so honored.

“Her election is a testament to Justice Toal’s leadership abilities and a tribute to how progressively and diligently she has worked to improve not only South Carolina courts, but state court systems throughout the nation,” he said.

Toal’s improbable journey
If Toal’s journey to national recognition was improbable, it’s due largely to the world she was born into on Aug. 11, 1943.

The daughter of an electrical engineer and a one-time art major living in Columbia, Toal didn’t have any attorneys among her family members.

After attending parochial school and public school in Columbia and graduating from Dreher High School in 1961, Toal enrolled at Agnes Scott College as a philosophy and education major.

There, she served on the college’s judicial council and on the National Supervisory Board of the U.S. National Student Association. Those activities, as well as her already- recognized abilities as a debater, inspired the father of a friend to suggest she consider pursing a career in law.

“He sat me down and talked to me about it, and what made the conversation so remarkable was that back then, in 1965, the law was not a field that was particularly open to women,” Toal said.

So closed was the profession perceived to be to women that a faculty adviser at Agnes Scott tried to discourage her.

“She said, ‘Jean, I think you’re making a big mistake,’ ” Toal recalled. “Fortunately, I didn’t listen.”

When Toal enrolled in the law program at the University of South Carolina, from which she would graduate with her J.D. degree in 1968, there were only three other women in her class.

“And there weren’t but 10 women practicing law in the entire state,” she said. “But I have to say that my classmates were my biggest advocates.”

Among them was William Toal, who would soon become her husband. The couple recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.

After graduating from USC, where she had served as the managing editor, lead articles editor and book review editor of the South Carolina Law Review, Toal took a job as an associate at the Haynesworth Law Firm in Greenville.

“When I was admitted to the South Carolina Bar in 1968, women comprised less than 1 percent of the licensed lawyers in the state, and weren’t even allowed to sit on juries in our state courts,” she said. “Fortunately, the 19th Amendment had opened the doors to women sitting on juries in the federal courts, but South Carolina didn’t ratify it until I’d been practicing for eight months.

“Once they did, however, I can tell you a lot of women served on juries … because they didn’t have job-related exemptions,” Toal added.

That proved to be an auspicious reality for the young lawyer, who quickly became a litigator for the firm, handling a wide variety of cases.

“They needed someone ‘who could talk to all those women,’” Toal said with a laugh, imitating a male voice.