Making Headlines

In the Newsroom

Bill Hackworth ’73 served as editor-in-chief for the 1972-73 academic year, which kicked off with the staff taking home a 16th consecutive ABA first-place award for student newspapers. At that time, reporters banged out articles on typewriters. Edited articles would have been hot-waxed to paste-up pages, each piece neatly hemmed in by border tape.

It was a transformative time. The Viet­nam War was ending, and at the University, students were seeking social change. Hack­worth took Evidence with Larry Gibson, the first black UVA Law professor. The Law School was contemplating its move to North Grounds.

By that time, the Law Weekly was housed in a trailer adjacent to Clark Hall. It boasted a staff of 45 students, including business and advertising staff, and more than 2,500 subscribers.

“I suspect that the mix of serious mate­rial, such as the ‘DICTA’ column, along with informative articles about Law School orga­nizations and activities, a good bit of humor, a clean layout and professional printing made the VLW stand out,” Hackworth said. He would go on to become a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and, later, city attorney for Roanoke, Virginia, before retiring in 2011.

The staff members were talented, but few had newspaper experience.

“We relied heavily on what those at Mr. Jefferson’s University so often do — tradi­tion — and followed the same basic format devised over the previous 25 years,” he said.

Hackworth attributed some of the Law Weekly’s success to a rapport with the Stu­dent Legal Forum, which during his years recruited notable speakers to lecture at the Law School, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’59, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and former Chief Justice Earl Warren.

“Our reporters were able to perform side-by-side with the national media when they covered these speakers,” Hackworth said.

“For example, I remember squashing a proposal to publish faculty salaries,” she said. “I cannot remember if we thought them too low or too high — I expect the latter.”

Dunmire retired in 2013 as deputy general counsel of Commerce Bancshares in Kansas City, Missouri. She had worked for two law firms in Kansas City before joining the bank’s corporate legal department in 1984.

“I was satisfied and proud to be elected editor-in-chief as a result of my hard work and dedication to the paper,” she said. “It did not even occur to me that I was the ‘first woman.’”

“Constitutionalizing The Criminal Law?,” by professors John C. Jeffries Jr. ’73 and Peter W. Low ’63 was published March 25, 1977, and was cited in Patterson v. New York that June.

The professors, who had clerked at the Supreme Court earlier in their careers, had turned to the Law Weekly for an immediate outlet to contribute to the legal conversation.

“We needed to get our views in the public domain quickly if they were ever going to come to the attention of the court while it mattered,” Low said, adding that the article was Jeffries’ idea, and “he bore the laboring oar in its execution.”

Patterson, written by Justice Byron White, upheld a New York statute that allowed murder to be reduced to manslaughter if the defendant proved by a preponderance of the evidence that the act was the result of “extreme emotional disturbance for which there was a reasonable explanation or excuse.”

The New York law was a compromise, Low said. It significantly broadened the concept of provocation, which had traditionally reduced murder to manslaughter, in ex­change for putting the burden of proof on the defendant. The question was whether such compromises conflicted with the obligation of the prosecutor to prove the elements of a criminal offense beyond a reasonable doubt.

In a footnote citing the DICTA column, the court recognized, as the column had argued, that New York’s law was part of a growing trend. “It was important to then-current law reform efforts for the court to uphold the New York law,” Low said. He added that “Patterson settled the issue for criminal defenses and mitigations, although it resurfaced 23 years later in the context of factors related to sentencing.”

Low retired in 2014 and is now profes­sor emeritus. Jeffries in August became the University’s senior vice president for advancement.

Case Dismissed

In addition to its many successes, the Law Weekly faced challenges not unfamiliar to its professional counterparts.

A 1970 interview and commentary piece headlined “Racist Justice in Charlottesville” criticized the arrest of a black resident by Charlottesville police officers. One officer was described as “notorious in the black community for racism and brutality.”

In response, two officers filed a $200,000 defamation suit against Virginia Weekly As­sociates Inc. and 15 people, seeking $50,000 in compensation and $150,000 in punitive damages. The defendants responded that one officer “has on several occasions made indiscriminate, unreasonable and unneces­sary display of weapons in incidents involving black people.”

Assistant Professor Gail Marshall ’68, who then taught contracts, torts and legal philosophy at the Law School, served as pro bono counsel for the Law Weekly in 1971 and sought dismissal. After newspaper staff showed up for depositions and the plaintiffs did not, the case was dropped.

“Back in the day, depositions were not automatic, so getting the court to order them was, in my view, what caused them to abandon the matter,” she said.

Marshall recalled that, as she and news­paper staff members drove away from the courthouse, one of the defendants remarked, “Something very important didn’t happen here today!”

Marshall left teaching and later became recognized for her pro bono efforts in the areas of fair housing, the environment and parolee rights. Today, she runs her own law office in Rapidan, Virginia.

Although the defamation suit may not have been frivolous on its face, “I think they truly thought they could silence this kind of criticism,” she said.

The plaintiffs faced a high bar because as public officials, Marshall explained, the officers would have to prove the newspaper acted with reckless regard, whether the Law Weekly’s accusations were truthful or not.

“A Thousand Benjamins,” which has been described as “a wistful tale about two sad but funny people,” was completed by graduation and published in 1990. The Law Weekly’s headline announced on the front page in 1987: “Kun writes serious novel.”

Since law school, Kun has filled his per­sonal bibliography with books on sports and fiction, as well as co-creating the Wage & Hour Guide for Employers app. His 2005 novel “You Poor Monster” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

His novel “The Locklear Letters,” a farcical look at celebrity worship, will be made into a movie titled “Eat Wheaties,” starring Tony Hale, Danielle Brooks, Elisha Cuthbert and Sarah Chalke.

“The main character, Sid Straw, happened to write a humor column in college and sends some of his old columns to people,” he said, “and, for that, I used revised versions of some of my old VLW columns.”

As Kun’s column illustrated, though the paper started as a fairly formal institution— “The VLW was always a high-class opera­tion,” Hackworth said—it evolved to include more humor and irreverence over the years. The paper published an annual fall humor edition during his day.

Members of the staff were also gleefully glib in their reporting of recreational sports, including “Mad Bowl” football. Law Weekly and Virginia Law Review staff faced off an­nually at the Madison Bowl, a playing field across from the Fralin Art Museum.

Faculty served as referees, including future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for a 38-0 Law Weekly triumph in 1970.

Neither team took the games seriously, Hackworth recalled, and coverage was con­spicuously one-sided: “Law Weakly Machine Crushes Revue in Tie Game,” the paper reported in November 1972.

The humor would find its way to the new location, Dunmire recalled.

“The paper consistently referred to the rest of the University as the ‘South Grounds,’ in response to the annoying practice of referring to the area occupied by the Law School, Business School and [Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School] as the North Grounds,” she said. “We referred to the Law School as ‘No-Name Hall,’ until it was renamed ‘EDIFICE LEX’ by the winner of the Law Weekly’s first annual ‘Name That Building’ contest.”