Peter Low, who retires this month after 50 years on the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law, has worn many hats over the course of his career: Supreme Court clerk, law reformer, associate dean, UVA provost and professor.

No matter which hat he wore, he aimed to improve everything he worked on, whether it was his teaching or the criminal justice system.

"One of the great things about academic life is that it's a constant learning process," Low said. "That's the joy of legal academia in many ways — struggling with hard problems and trying to find better answers."

Low, who served almost eight years as vice president and provost of the University from 1994 to 2001, joined the UVA Law faculty in 1964, just a year after graduating from the Law School. During the academic career that followed, he participated in efforts to improve the criminal justice system, taught at the FBI Academy and co-authored popular casebooks in criminal law, federal courts and civil rights litigation. He also spent many years shepherding the Law School's curriculum and students toward success.

"Peter Low was, for 15 years, the linchpin of making this institution work. He was almost like the chief operating officer for the Law School — a title no one thought of then," UVA law professor and former Dean John C. Jeffries, Jr. said. "He's a critically important person in the life of this institution."

 

From the Classroom to the Supreme Court

After studying philosophy at Princeton as an undergraduate, Low married and started law school at UVA in the fall of 1960.

"They weren't paying philosophers very much at the time," he joked. "At the end of the day, law deals with some of the most deeply difficult political and moral dilemmas that people have to face."

You can debate moral questions forever in philosophy, "but you can't do that in law," he added.  "In law you have some of the same deep problems, but you’ve got to have an answer tomorrow."

Though most Supreme Court clerks today first work for a federal appeals court, Low went straight from the classroom to clerking for the most powerful judge in the country, Chief Justice Earl Warren.

In that term, 1963-64, President Kennedy was assassinated, the Warren Commission was established, and the justices made several landmark rulings, including New York Times v. Sullivan, a key decision supporting freedom of the press, andReynolds v. Sims, the one-man-one-vote decision requiring that districts for the election of state legislators be roughly equal in proportion (Warren called it his most important opinion). That term also marked the last of the sit-in cases, involving challenges to racially based exclusionary policies in public places, such as restaurants. The Supreme Court ultimately decided the cases on narrow grounds because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 resolved the issue by statute.

"The Court dealt with an incredible list of cases while we were there," Low said. "We realized it was historic times. It was a great term to be there."

 

Low at his desk in Clark HallThe 'Year or Two' That Turned Into a Career

Though Low intended to practice law after his clerkship, he accepted an invitation to join the faculty instead—“for a year or two that turned into a career.” He came to the faculty along with fellow clerk Professor A. E. Dick Howard. They and three other hires brought the number of full-time professors at UVA Law to 22.

At first, Low taught classes with as many as 150 students, some of whom were older than he.

Rather than finding it intimidating, "I thought it was fun," he said.

McGuireWoods attorney Lucius Bracey '67 took Criminal Law with Low. Bracey said two-thirds of the professors at UVA Law then had decided to teach following successful careers working on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C. Low was among a new breed of teachers focused on theory. They started teaching early in their careers, after a clerkship.

"He was a wonderful teacher; he was very enthusiastic. I would say he's pretty passionate about criminal law and it being understood and applied," Bracey said. "Students had a great respect for him because of his obvious intellect."

Low said the first-year criminal law course included criminal procedure when he started, and criminal procedure was not taught separately as it is today. The field of criminal procedure expanded rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, as more and more Supreme Court cases on the subject, such as Miranda, were decided.

"The whole idea of applying the Bill of Rights to the states was in the process of happening," Low said. "It wasn't necessary at that time to have a separate course in constitutional criminal procedure."

Jeffries, who graduated from the Law School in 1972, took Low for Criminal Law, Federal Courts and a seminar on the Supreme Court.

"He was very gifted at making analytical complexity clear," Jeffries said. He is a "genuine expert on federal criminal law and the sentencing apparatus that attends it."

Soon after Jeffries joined the faculty he began collaborating with Low, including co-writing casebooks on criminal law, federal courts and civil rights litigation.

"He's a wonderful colleague," Jeffries said. "He's the person I go to when I am analytically confused."

 

Low in Clark HallStriving to Improve the Criminal Justice System

Low said his career was unconventional by modern academic standards, as it was punctuated by projects that tied into his dedication to improving the criminal justice system.

From 1965-68 he served as a reporter for the Advisory Committee on Sentencing and Review, part of the American Bar Association's Project on Standards for Criminal Justice, which was spearheaded by then-ABA president Lewis Powell Jr. (who was later to be appointed to the Supreme Court). Other participants in the project included Herbert Wechsler, a Columbia law professor known as the “father” of the Model Penal Code, and then-Circuit Court Judge Warren Burger, who became chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1969. The resulting publications proposing bar-endorsed standards in a number of areas were important ABA contributions to improvements in the criminal justice system, Low said.

He also was a consultant for the Commission on Reform of Federal Criminal Laws, which was established by Congress to rewrite federal criminal laws using the Model Penal Code and the newly revised New York Penal Code as templates. The group was also known as the Brown Commission, after its chairman, Pat Brown, the former attorney general and governor of California and the father of current California Gov. Jerry Brown.

“The commission produced an integrated and consistent proposed federal criminal codification to replace the inconsistent and, in many ways, incoherent hodgepodge of alphabetically listed offenses adopted by Congress over the years and spread throughout many volumes of the federal code,” Low said.

The Brown Commission proposals led to a decade of bipartisan federal criminal law reform efforts that ultimately failed.

“The project was almost doomed to failure from the beginning because of all of the different special interests that must be accommodated in legislation as all-encompassing as a criminal code, and as visible as it necessarily is at the federal level,” he said.

In the next decade Low would serve as a reporter for the American Law Institute's "Model Penal Code and Commentaries, Parts I and II," resulting in several books that line a full shelf in Low's office.

"My early scholarly efforts were spent on law reform efforts of that sort, rather than churning out law review articles," he said.

Low contributed to the legal system in other ways. He served as a consultant at the FBI National Academy in Quantico for 30 years, and from 1972-82 he lectured about the Supreme Court to more than 10,000 state and local police officers, and at numerous training sessions for FBI lawyers. The focus on state and local police was part of a college credit-granting program established through a relationship between the FBI and what was then the UVA School of Continuing Education.

"At one point a vast majority of police chiefs in the country had gone through this program," Low said. "What the U.S. Supreme Court did had a big impact on what they did, and so they could ask really hard questions. Dealing with them helped a lot in my teaching here."

 

Leading the Law School and UVA

Low judges moot court

At the Law School, Low became a central figure in the school's administration at a time when faculty managed many duties now handled by full-time staff. As assistant dean from 1965-69, Low served in a role similar to that of the assistant dean for student affairs today.

"I was the person students came to when they had problems," he said.

Then from 1969-76 and again from 1989–94 he was associate dean, a role similar to the vice dean today through which, among other things, he managed the curriculum.

"It's hard today to imagine just how central Peter Low was to the operation of this institution 25 years ago," Jeffries said. "He had so many administrative responsibilities and discharged them so well."

In January of 1994, then–UVA President John Casteen tapped Low to become provost, the academic head of the University. In that role, Low said he oversaw the University-wide faculty tenure and promotion process, and played a central role in assuring that the right people were selected to lead the various schools and other academic units of the University.

Low and JeffriesBecause the University is so decentralized, Low said getting the right people into the right jobs was key to its success.

"Whether the English Department is any good is going to depend on the people in the English department and the central administration of the College of Arts and Sciences, and not the provost," Low said. "The academic leadership from all schools at the University comes from the faculty."

Casteen praised Low's work on everything from working with deans on new building projects to creating — with Leonard Sandridge, then the executive vice president and chief operating officer — new budget models and financial structures to make the best use of the University's increased visibility and growth during that time.

"Peter was in charge in times when UVA was alone among the public universities in the popular top-25 rankings, when faculty work here came to be a gold standard for the nation, and when a new generation of deans came to us, largely because of Peter’s supervision of searches and his uncommon quality of listening critically to advice from faculty leaders and delivering search results that made faculty work stronger and more durable," Casteen said. 

He added that working with Low was "powerfully rewarding."

"The combination of intellect with the gifts of sound self-discipline and a love for the best things in life makes Peter a rare and wonderful colleague," Casteen said.

Apart from his time as provost, Low has seen many changes at the Law School over the years, among them a quadrupling of full-time faculty, the Law School's move from Clark Hall to North Grounds, increased diversity in a larger student body, and an explosion in the number of elective classes and adjunct faculty. (More at 50 Years at UVA: Professors Howard and Low Look Back at Evolution of Law School)

 

Turning the Page on Teaching

Though Low is retiring from teaching courses, "my life will not change very much," he said. He will keep an office at the Law School, and will continue to write.

Low's fourth edition revision of the casebook "Criminal Law," co-authored with Jeffries and UVA law professors Anne Coughlin and Richard Bonnie, will be submitted to the publisher next January. The eighth edition of his Federal Courts casebook, co-authored with Jeffries and Duke Law Professor Curtis Bradley, is currently in press and will be published in May.

He has an article coming out in the Virginia Law Review in December, co-authored with third-year law student Ben Wood, and another planned for completion next spring to be co-authored with second-year law student Joel Johnson. Both students took his elective Criminal Law and the Supreme Court, and both articles deal with issues that were developed in that course.

"It was a really great class; he's a really great teacher," Wood said. "He had a mastery of the material and made very complicated topics a lot easier to understand, even as a 1L."

Wood asked him to supervise his Law Review note, but Low suggested co-writing an article instead.

"Of course, I was totally delighted," Wood said. "He has an encyclopedic knowledge of all these different topics that tied into the paper, so it was a great learning experience."

Low said he will miss interacting with students. He estimates he has taught more than 5,000 over the years.

"The quality of the students here is incredible," he said. "Even the first day of a first-year criminal law class, you're dealing with very, very smart people, and they can challenge you with questions. Constant interaction with people of a different generation keeps you younger, no doubt about that."

 

Map of Low's travelsMore About Peter Low

Low's father, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry, was teaching at Amherst when Low was born. He later was personnel director at a rayon plant and manager of a cellophane plant, both in Virginia, before rising higher in the corporate ranks. Low was the first lawyer in his family, though his younger brother, David, later attended UVA Law while Low was on the faculty. He graduated in 1968.

Low’s early education included several years in a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher and four grades, and five years at Woodberry Forest in Orange, Virginia, before he enrolled at Princeton.

RV VemaLow took a year off from Princeton to travel the world on the RV Vema, a three-masted schooner (left), under the auspices of the Lamont Geological Observatory (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), a part of Columbia University. He was a "scientific deck hand" on an oceanographic expedition that was part of the International Geophysical Year (1957-58). His mother, an artist, made a map of his travels (above).

He recently went to a 50-year reunion of Supreme Court clerks who served from 1963-64 — 14 of the 16 surviving clerks attended.
 
Low and his wife, Carol, have two daughters, Cathy and Randi, and two grandchildren.
 
Low has played a key role in managing the University's presence in Universitas 21, or U21, a consortium that brings together an international collection of universities to work together on matters that they are unable to achieve by working alone. It was formed in the late 1990s, and UVA has been a member since 2001.
 
He was a member of the faculty at the law session of the Salzburg Seminars in American Studies in 1972, and was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University in England for six months in 1970. He has also taught as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford law schools.
 
He is a member of the Raven Society, and is a Life Member of the American Law Institute.

Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.