Sharon J. Bell made the perfect judge. And when she died on October 27, 2024, at age 80, I was left wondering, “When did she get to be 80?”
Mike Moyers, who followed Bell as chancellor, recalled her as “extraordinarily fair. … She listened to the evidence, didn’t intervene from the bench and she knew the law.”
Moyers said he admired Bell and thought she was what a judge should be. “She was very supportive of me in my legal career,” he said. “Sharon Bell was one of the best people on the bench here and Knox County was blessed to have her.”
Funeral services will be Saturday, Nov. 2, 2024, at Rose Funeral Home, Mann Chapel, 6200 Kingston Pike, with family visitation from 1-2 and the service at 2 p.m. The full obituary is here.
Sharon was interviewed by legal legend Pamela Reeves for the Knoxville Bar Association. It’s an hour well spent. Link here.
“There were just five or six women in the whole (UT Law) school, two in my class,” she told Reeves. Read Sandra Day O’Connor’s biography, First, to see job prospects for female lawyers in the not-so-distant past. The first female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court had to take a secretarial job to wedge into a major law firm as a newly minted lawyer.
Sharon set her own sails. After a stint at the legal aid clinic and two terms in the state House, she opened a solo practice in Knoxville. She later added two lawyers.
Bell told Reeves how she met the late Ed Dossett, who became Knox County’s district attorney from 1982 until his death from cancer in 1992 at age 44.
“Ed couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a farmer or a lawyer,” Bell said. “He showed up to interview in overalls and kept saying, “yes ma’am,” and “no, ma’am.” Dossett and Bell worked together for 10 years.
Ed had played football at Karns High School and was the quintessential good-ol’-boy. After his death, Sharon remained friends with his wife and kids. “Come on, let’s go see Katy play volleyball (at Karns High, of course).”
While I never covered Judge Bell on the bench, I did work on her campaigns. The first, for general sessions court judge in 1982, and the second, for chancellor in 1986. She served in Chancery Court for 20 years, retiring in 2006. She was the first female chancellor in Tennessee.
I remember her as an agile sprite of a woman, always respectful, with a soft, Southern drawl. “Excuse me, could I just edge over here?” And the next thing you knew she was on the front row. Sharon arrived in Knoxville from Alabama (which she didn’t mention much) because she had a scholarship to UT Law School.
Then-Rep. Mike Robertson, a lawyer from Claiborne County, told me how he and Sharon would draft amendments on the floor. Cool. A good amendment can do wonders for a bad or mediocre bill.
Bell never lost an election in her adopted town.
She lived in every quadrant of Knox County. While in law school, she rented a place in South Knox and that’s the district she later represented in Nashville. Next, she lived in a big house in Inskip. Next came a house with a great yard in Holston Hills, and finally she lived in West Knoxville.
Sharon was partial to dogs. “It’s not that I don’t like cats,” she once said, “But with the dogs …”
No telling how many strays and outlaws she had taken in, but her family will make sure they get homes. I love how they summed up her life: “Sharon led an unassuming, unapologetic and uncluttered life.”
Sharon Bell would like that too. R.I.P.
