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.