The First Law Class

In July 1826, law professor John Tayloe Lomax stepped into his Pavilion III classroom and into a new experiment in American legal education. At a time when most aspiring lawyers learned their trade through proprietary schools or apprenticeship with practicing attorneys, the University of Virginia’s law program was something different: one rooted in a university, taught by a full time professor, with a multiyear curriculum that sought to marry theoretical inquiry with the practical needs of the legal profession.

A few American institutions were already experimenting with university-based legal study — specifically the College of William & Mary, Transylvania University and Harvard — but none had yet demonstrated that such programs could rival training through apprenticeship. Further, the now-familiar law school structure of a three-year professional program for graduate students was nearly a century away. In 1826, academic legal education was novel, filled with decisions and tensions about how to structure this new approach to legal instruction. Who should teach law? How would the classroom operate? Would students enroll? Would UVA’s model of legal education succeed?

As UVA Law marks its 200th anniversary of classroom instruction, the familiar claim that it is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the country carries deep resonance. For this experiment, continuity was anything but assured in 1826.

Who would teach law?

The University of Virginia began its first session of classes in 1825 with no law professor in place. All other faculty positions had been filled, but the search for the “Law Chair” had stretched on without resolution, lengthened by the high stakes it carried for University Rectors Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

No set blueprint existed for what a university-based legal academic should be in the American educational landscape, but the rectors still held stringent criteria for this new professor. The two men had spent months vetting candidates, scrutinizing their politics, oratorical skills and intellectual pedigree. They wanted more than a practicing attorney; they wanted a native Virginian, an accomplished legal thinker, and a republican to counter the influence of federalism on the next generation. The professionalism of the Virginia bar was at stake, as was the American union.

The Board of Visitors, led by Jefferson and Madison, considered nearly a dozen candidates for the law chair. Their list included notables like U.S. Attorney General William Wirt and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Philip Barbour. Some they rejected as underqualified, while others turned down the position. Few seasoned jurists were willing to uproot their established careers to join a new, untested academic experiment.

Jefferson and Madison grew anxious over the vacancy. The University needed the law school to bolster enrollment. Both men noted with frustration that several students had abandoned the University’s inaugural session for want of a law program.

The stalemate finally broke in April 1826, when the Board of Visitors unanimously selected John Tayloe Lomax, a leading member of the Fredericksburg bar known for his private practice in equity. Jefferson wrote to Lomax, delighted, and spelled out the emoluments of the law chair: a standing salary of $1,500 a year; tuition fees from all students enrolled in the law program; the use of Pavilion III as a dwelling, office and lot for agriculture; and the duty of lecturing two hours every other day for the 10-month session. As there was no University president, faculty took on significant responsibilities in the superintendence of the University. Lomax would serve as faculty chairman for his first year.

Lomax signed on, and Jefferson shared the good news with the BOV: “Mr. Lomax has accepted the professorship of law and will open his school on the 1st of July.”

What law would be taught?

Lomax delivered his first law lecture to a packed room in the first-floor classroom of Pavilion III, addressing the 26 students who made up the University of Virginia’s inaugural law class. What they would study — and how Lomax would teach — remained in flux as the new law program found its footing.

From the outset, the central question was whether the curriculum would lean toward broad theoretical instruction or the practical skills required of a working attorney. Jefferson had envisioned a balance: a program that would train future statesmen in the principles of government while also preparing practitioners for the realities of legal work.

No existing American university had fully resolved this balance. Only a handful of university law school models existed in the United States at the time. William & Mary established a law chair in 1779 under Jefferson’s guidance; Harvard opened its law school in 1817. Both institutions served as direct models for UVA’s enterprise, but the approach remained largely experimental.

Curricular guidance for the law program was slim, but expectations were grand. The University enactments stated that the law school would teach “common and statute law, that of chancery, the laws feudal, civil, mercatorial, and maritime, and nature and nations,” as well as principles of government. Jefferson and Madison had added this last requirement in 1825, pairing it with mandatory readings approved by the BOV: the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, the 1799 Virginia Resolutions, George Washington’s farewell address, and writings on government by John Locke and Algernon Sidney.

Lomax quickly discovered that his first-year students wanted professional legal training. “Their demand for the law is for a trade--the means, the most expeditious and convenient, for their future livelihood,” Lomax wrote. He felt pressure to create a curriculum that would keep students from leaving for more expedient, traditional training through apprenticeships or proprietary schools. With competing methods of legal instruction in mind, Lomax informed his first students that the full law program would take two years to complete but would still serve those who enrolled for just one year.

A “Junior Class” of first-year students would study municipal law, grounded in state laws and decisions. If a student decided to “hurry into practice” after one year, Lomax advertised that his UVA instruction would still offer an advantage over one year of training elsewhere. Students who remained for a second year would join the Senior Class. In addition to attending their own sessions on advanced texts, this Senior cohort sat with the Junior Class to revise their work on the same material as the previous year, thus deepening their understanding of legal principles.

The liberal arts philosophy shaped this curricular flexibility as much as market demands. As a core tenet of Jefferson’s vision for UVA, students were free to choose their own courses and chart their own educational paths. Students could take law courses for one or multiple years depending on their individual interests. This flexible structure remained characteristic of UVA’s law program through the end of the 19th century.

Lomax’s first syllabus leaned heavily on property law, a core concern of legal practice in Virginia. He explained to the BOV that, for the first session, he believed it most effective to devote his efforts exclusively to municipal law, the material that formed “the ordinary business of the courts of Virginia.” Aside from early lectures on the federal and state constitutions, Lomax found no time to teach the principles of government that Jefferson and Madison had assigned to the Law School. There would be time for this “higher branch of study,” Lomax hoped, through supplemental lectures, after the students had completed their initial course in professional law.

From the start, the law program was known as a professional school within UVA. It shared this distinction with the medical school and stood apart from the University’s “academic” schools, such as chemistry or modern languages. Noting that “no Student attends or is ever likely to attend these two professional schools of Law and Medicine” at the same time, Lomax asked the BOV if he could move his afternoon law lectures to the medical school’s morning time slot. This would clear his midday schedule to prepare for the next day’s lessons. Further, the morning sessions would relieve his classroom of the “dulness and lassitude which are apt to oppress the minds of many after dinner.”

What would law students read?

What readings would anchor the law curriculum? Would they be the authoritative but dense texts of Sir Edward Coke or the more accessible prose of Sir William Blackstone? Jefferson was adamant that Coke’s “Institutes” serve as the leading text for the law school. He believed that countering Blackstone’s broad appeal and, critically, his monarchical leanings would be one of the most important contributions that UVA’s academic enterprise would make to the legal profession.

The book market proved pivotal. Lomax adopted Blackstone’s “Commentaries” as the central text for the Law School’s first session, not out of disagreement with Jefferson, but because he could not secure copies of Coke’s textbook. By the start of the second law session in 1827, Philadelphia publisher Robert Hall had produced an American version of Coke’s seminal work. Lomax thought it a fine edition: “I should pronounce it perhaps the very best book of English Law that is extant for the Student, and I may add, for the Practitioner. It has most deservedly been made the textbook of the University of Virginia for beginners.”

Blackstone, though, would eventually win out. For a time, Lomax experimented with teaching from both texts, but the back-and-forth was short-lived. By 1828, Lomax made Blackstone the “first book of the Junior Class.” He preferred the edition by Joseph Chitty. Law students were soon expected to arrive at the University already familiar with Blackstone’s “Commentaries.”

Treatises ruled UVA’s early law curriculum. As Lomax found his rhythm, he added more texts to the syllabi. He excluded Matthew Bacon’s “Abridgment” and Charles Fearne on remainders because they were too expensive. Instead, first-year law students read the first American edition of William Cruise’s digest of laws related to real property. Senior law students reviewed advanced texts on procedure and property: Samuel Toller’s “Law of Executors,” Henry Stephen on pleading, and Samuel Phillipps’ “Law of Evidence.”

Students could purchase texts at the bookstore on the modern-day UVA Corner. First-year students from Virginia were expected to acquire a copy of Virginia’s revised code or, preferably, Joseph Tate’s “Digest of the Laws of Virginia.” Ideally, these volumes were interleaved with blank pages for student notes. Students from “abroad” were advised to bring the statutes and decisions of their own states.

If students lacked personal copies of texts, they could turn to the University library, but access came with strict rules. Borrowing from the Rotunda library required a written permit from a professor. Students were not allowed in the library or permitted to take books from the shelves except in the librarian’s presence. Unsurprisingly, Coke and Blackstone topped the list of the most frequently checked-out legal texts in the law program’s first year.

Jefferson’s hand-selected legal texts for the UVA library had favored English writers, particularly Whiggish authors like Coke, but the needs of the classroom were evolving. American legal studies were shifting from a former reliance on English precedent toward a growing body of American case law. Many of the English texts proved obsolete for American study.

In 1827, Lomax informed the Board of Visitors that the UVA library needed critical updates to support this transition. He recommended that the University order case reports of Virginia and of the U.S. Supreme Court, specifically Wheaton’s reports, so that constitutional law could be “profitably” studied. He also requested that the University subscribe to John Hall’s American Law Journal, published in Baltimore. Each of these decisions, from choosing Blackstone over Coke to sourcing American editions, reflected the adaptive nature of the school’s early years.

What style of teaching would the Law School embrace?

The University outfitted the Law School’s Pavilion III classroom with benches and tables, and gave Lomax the latitude to select a mode of instruction best suited to the science of law. Textbook readings formed the basis of every class session.

The Litchfield proprietary law school had long relied on the lecture method, but Harvard had introduced a different model, known as the text-and-recitation method, which Lomax embraced for UVA. This approach soon became standard across American higher education in the antebellum period. Under it, students were assigned sections of textbook readings and then examined on that material in class through verbal recitations.

Lomax was happy to dispense with lectures in his classroom. Lecturing, he believed, was insufficient for a “science so extensive and abstruse as Law.” A one-hour lecture would fill six pages of ordinary type, and at that rate, Lomax calculated, a year’s worth of daily law lectures would fall well short of the pages they could cover in Blackstone’s “Commentaries.”

As one member of the first law class wrote to a friend, Lomax delivered no regular lectures. Instead, he assigned readings and quizzed students on their contents in class, “accompanying his examinations with appropriate and illustrative remarks.”

Lomax reserved his occasional lectures for points that demanded deeper explanation. Most often, he used these lectures to clarify aspects of Virginia or American law, specifically the subjects of slavery, aliens, the registration of deeds and the law of descents (estate law). These topics were not covered by the English texts that anchored the curriculum.

The Virginia press, which so often carried news and reviews of UVA’s new law program, agreed. Editors of the Charlottesville Advocate, who were lawyers themselves and included Lomax’s successor in 1830, John A. G. Davis, wrote that the science of law was too complex for lectures. Texts by established jurists were essential for legal teaching.

Would students enroll?

Whether students would embrace UVA’s academic model was an open and pressing question. Would they commit to the multiyear study of law in a university setting, under university rules? What would student life even look like in this new environment?

UVA admitted white men over the age of 16. The 26 students of the first law class reflected that narrow vision: They were nearly all Virginians, with a handful from Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, Kentucky and Washington, D.C. All were members of wealthy slave-owning families. UVA’s Law School enrollment in 1826 was already greater than Harvard’s or Yale’s that year, though was still short of the numbers seen at established proprietary programs like Litchfield.

Law students lived on the Lawn or in nearby boarding houses under the strictly prescribed rhythms of university life. Students living in Lawn or Range rooms shared these spaces with a roommate and took meals in designated “hotels” — dining halls leased by the University to hotel keepers who relied on enslaved laborers to cook, serve meals and administer to the students.

Strict University rules for student life revealed the idealistic hopes of a new educational experiment. A dress code governed student attire. Students were expected to appear in a plain black gown or inexpensive frock. Hats were to be round and black. Rules of conduct were equally rigid: no smoking or tobacco use, no swearing, no gambling.

Student behavior quickly exposed the tenuousness of these expectations. Early classes were notorious for riotous conduct, much to the frustration of Jefferson and Madison. Violence against the enslaved laborers who sustained the Academical Village was a grim and persistent reality.

In the curriculum, the principle of voluntary study remained foundational. Henry Tutwiler, a student in UVA’s first session and a law graduate in 1833, described Jefferson’s vision as one in which each student could pursue the subjects that matched his “special tastes and proposed pursuits in life,” with academic honors awarded only for demonstrated mastery, not for time spent in the classroom.

How would legal mastery be measured in this new form of academic legal education? There was great public interest on this point. The University held two examination periods during each session, both in the Rotunda. Students who demonstrated accurate and extensive knowledge of the subjects taught in their school earned the degree of Graduate. Newspapers published the names of top-scoring students. UVA printed extra copies of exams for public distribution. Lomax published his full 1829 exam in a journal, outlining the legal knowledge that defined the academic expectations of a UVA law graduate.

UVA’s Law School saw its first three graduates in 1829. By the 1830s, the law classes outgrew the program’s space in Pavilion III, prompting a move into a larger Rotunda classroom as the law program took permanent root.

Two centuries later, UVA’s law program bears little resemblance to the project launched in Pavilion III, but the questions that defined the law program’s uncertain beginnings — what law should be taught, how it should be taught and who should be allowed to learn it — never fully disappeared. That ongoing, though slow process of asking and confronting these questions has led to the emergence of the Law School we know today. In 1841, the University began awarding the Bachelor of Laws degree. Not until the 1890s did the law faculty grow beyond two professors. In 1909, the Law School adopted a three-year course of study to expand specialized electives and align with this new national standard. As the curriculum evolved, so too has the make-up of the Law School’s faculty, staff and student body. The early years of the program helped structure the experiment in American university-based legal education, but the larger enterprise has continued, reshaped over 200 years by new generations, new legal thought and new demands on the profession.

Randall Flaherty is the head of Special Collections and Law School historian.