Emma Shannon Walser

Walser was born in Maryland County on 24 July 1929 to Eugene Himie Shannon and Edith E. Harris. Her father was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.^[2][3] She went to school at St Theresa's convent in Monrovia and then to Secretarial College. She worked as private secretary to the Manager of the Bank of Monrovia for a number of years. She later returned to study at the University of Liberia, graduating with an LLB in 1969.^[2]

Walser was appointed a judge to the Montserrado County judicial circuit in 1971 by President William R. Tolbert Jr., making her the country's first female judge.^[2][4] She was seen as a progressive and liberal judge.^[2] "While it was customary for judges to decide cases based on instructions from the president, Walser gained a reputation for deciding cases strictly on merit and the law."^[5]

Walser publicly refused to sentence an indigenous man to a death sentence because she argued he had been poorly represented by a state lawyer,^[6] leading to a Supreme Court of Liberia finding in Republic of Liberia v. Emma Shannon-Walser, 27 LLR 274 (1978) that the constitutional right to counsel includes the right to competent counsel.^[7] In 1975, she was the head of a special committee appointed to study all laws affecting women's rights.^[8]

In April 1979, Walser challenged the government's detention of opposition leaders alleged to have instigated the rice riots, a precursor to the 1980 Coup d'état. She was removed from the bench in 1979 by a joint resolution of the conservative Legislature.^[2] Five hundred Liberian women, including Olubanke King Akerele, petitioned and protested the action, to no avail.^[9][10][11] In 2007, Walser was named by the Liberian People's Party as one of those whose "only crime was the advocacy of participatory democracy."^[12]

Walser later worked for Amnesty International and moved to Switzerland.^[2]