The Edifice Complex

Images and additional research courtesy Addison Patrick and the Arthur J. Morris Law Library

Fifty years ago this past September, first-year students ushered in a new era, becoming the first class that would begin and end their three years at UVA Law at the school’s new $5.8 million campus on North Grounds.

In those early days, once they got past the mud and construction debris piled at the entrance, the aspiring lawyers entered a modernist rectilinear block that offered little in the way of amenities or a sense of shared history with the storied university founded by Thomas Jefferson.

“It wasn’t even utilitarian — it was just an ugly, bad building,” according to the cheerfully relayed memories of Pamela Clark ’77, an alumna who went on to become a pathologist in the UVA Health System. “It felt like Sputnik-era architecture, and second- or third-year students would talk about Clark Hall, this beautiful but overcrowded old building they had been in over on Main Grounds.”

This is the story of how that “ugly, bad building” would, in time, become a cherished home to generations of UVA Law graduates, just as its predecessors had been to those lawyers who had come before. It’s told through memories that spill off the pages of the Virginia Law Weekly and from the lips of alumni still eager to talk about “the best three years” of their lives — whether they were spent at a muddy construction site or piled on top of one another on Main Grounds.

The Last Tango

September 1974 was a time of new beginnings for the nation, as it sought to move on from the tumult of Vietnam and Watergate. The Law School’s new home offered a fresh start and a clean slate, a tabula rasa to build an institution that could evolve to accommodate the changing times.

North Grounds is the sixth home of the Law School. One of the original “departments” of the University, law classes were first offered in 1826 in Pavilion III on the Lawn. (For perspective, consider that John Marshall was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at the time, and his Marbury v. Madison decision, establishing judicial review, was just 23 years old.)

Law classes eventually expanded to Pavilion X and the Rotunda by the mid-19th century, then relocated to Minor Hall in 1911. In 1930, copper heir William Andrews Clark Jr., Class of 1899, donated the $350,000 for Clark Hall as a memorial to his first wife, Mabel Duffield Foster Clark. That stately building was dedicated in the fall of 1932, complete with a marbled and skylit central hall resplendent with neoclassical nude murals painted by Allyn Cox, in an area known as Mural Hall. The lintel above the columned entrance bore the now-familiar inscription from Professor Leslie Buckler: “That those alone may be servants of the law who labor with learning, courage, and devotion to preserve liberty and promote justice.”

Clark himself chose Cox, who had created paintings for Clark’s personal library. While the nudity has provided law students a running joke since 1932, Cox was later commissioned to paint several of the murals in the corridors and rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

Aesthetics and practicalities aside, alumni tend to feel nostalgic — and sometimes viscerally attached — to the building in which they attended law school, said Addison Patrick, the curatorial specialist at the UVA Law Library, which recently produced an exhibit capturing the moment and memories from the school’s 1974 move.

In fact, when an alumnus came back to visit Grounds in 1916, the school’s move to Minor Hall “so distressed him that the poor man ‘never did look at the new building, but hurried away to look at the old,’” Matthew Dewald wrote in Virginia magazine in 2017.

Professor Emeritus Richard Bonnie graduated from the Clark Hall version of the Law School in 1969 and joined the faculty in 1973. He took the move to North Grounds in stride, after spending several years crammed into the basement of Clark. While he knew the move was necessary, a recent visit to his old haunts stirred a deep sense of nostalgia, even as he poked his head into bricked-over sections of Clark Hall’s basement, orienting to a space that now seemed foreign.

When he descended a second set of stairs into the Environmental Sciences’ library stacks, however, he hit paydirt. He had found the corner that once housed the Law Review managing board offices, as well as the faculty office corridor he shared with Professor Charlie Whitebread.

“Aha! This is it — I’m home now,” he said with a grin. “This is the Law School to me, and this is what I have my attachment to. This is where we lived, except for when we came out to play wiffle ball in the stacks. This is where I was when I heard the news that Robert Kennedy [’51] had been assassinated. We suffered through the 1968 election down here.”

Bonnie was joined in the basement by the likes of future Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson ’72, a colleague on the Virginia Law Review and later a junior faculty member whose office at Clark was allegedly a converted broom closet.

Bonnie’s classmate and best friend, Martha Ballenger ’69, was one of just seven women in her class, but she was fiercely attached to Clark from the start.

“The day I drove into Charlottesville with all my worldly belongings in the car, I knew I’d found my home — the mountains, the history — it’s ineffable,” Ballenger said. “The facilities in Clark Hall did leave a lot to be desired, but the atmosphere was wonderful, even including the murals.”

With the Law School hosting a student body in 1963 that was four times its enrollment three decades prior, the overcrowding  was already desperate enough that Dean Hardy Cross Dillard, a 1927 graduate, even considered bisecting Mural Hall into two floors — “while at the same time getting rid of those God awful murals,” as Philip Mills Herrington quotes Dillard in his book, “The Law School at the University of Virginia: Architectural Expansion in the Realm of Thomas Jefferson.” (Herrington, now a James Madison University history professor, began work on the book while serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Law Library.)

In 1967, the Board of Visitors announced a $91.8 million capital outlay program across the university that included new buildings for the Law School, the Graduate School of Business Administration and the JAG School, primarily located on the Duke tract of land on Copeley Hill, behind the modern-day Barracks Road Shopping Center. The Duke tract was named for the multigenerational family of UVA lawyers who owned the property from 1863 to 1963.

While many students and graduates were ardently attached to Clark Hall, contemporaneous reports in the Law Weekly — which was being published from a mobile trailer — also reveal a sense of exasperation with their situation on Grounds, particularly as weather and shortages of building materials delayed opening of the long-planned structure.

In its last years as a law school, Clark Hall’s 70,000 square feet provided just six lecture rooms and one seminar room, according to the newspaper. In contrast, the new 136,000 square-foot facility would feature nine lecture rooms (three seating 150, and two each seating 125, 100 and 50), plus four seminar rooms. As an added bonus, all the rooms would be air-conditioned, a previously unimaginable luxury. 

Construction began in 1972, nearly five years after the money was allocated. A 1972 Law Weekly article bemoaned the delays and asked, rhetorically, whether “exposed nails in chairs really are conducive to legal learning,” and why “Mural Hall looks like 5 o’clock at the Fort Lee Officer’s Club,” presumably a reference to the ever-present lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School who were then sharing the space. A cartoon depicted a crumbling balcony over Mural Hall and a character tsk-tsking, “You’ll just have to wait ’til we get into the new Law School.”

The following year, another Law Weekly cartoon depicted students smooshed up against one another in Mural Hall, one mumbling, “300, 325, 350 students — what’s the difference?” Above them, a revised mural said “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Clark Hall itself could not properly host the sorts of dignitaries and speakers that UVA Law was capable of attracting. In March 1973, the Student Legal Forum brought Rep. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman and a 1972 presidential candidate, to Grounds. She spoke at Cabell Hall.

In the early 1970s, former U.N. Ambassador George H.W. Bush spoke at Newcomb Hall, while Sen. Edward Kennedy ’59 spoke at University Hall. Former Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Thurgood Marshall both spoke from the confines of the Law School lounge, which was also in the basement.

In the meantime, the Law Weekly often featured photos of the ongoing construction at North Grounds, attaching puns such as “Copeley Hole” and “Stonehenge.”

As the move date drew closer, tensions grew. If the anticipated move date was missed, the students would be spending the fall semester in Clark Hall and moving over winter break.

The school’s newspaper of record also fretted over indicators that the construction budget for the new campus omitted significant amenities, including dorms, food service, sidewalks, landscaping and even furniture.

Meanwhile, the Law Weekly continued to debate an appropriate name for the new Law School. One editorial suggested naming it after the deceased Bobby Kennedy, a suggestion rejected by a letter-writer who opposed the partisan taint of such a name. Another letter suggested it be named for Supreme Court Justice James Clark McReynolds, an 1884 graduate.

Law Library Director Frances Farmer had the unenviable task of organizing the relocation of 265,000 volumes from Clark Hall’s overstuffed library to the capacious new library, which would eventually have space for 500,000 volumes. (When Farmer joined the school in 1942, the library had just 38,000 uncatalogued volumes. By the time the school moved, the collection was already 65,000 volumes over capacity.)

The new Arthur J. Morris Law Library was dedicated in November 1974, honoring a $350,000 gift from Morris before his death the previous November. Morris, a 1901 graduate, was well-known in international banking circles, and was the father of the Morris Plan, which revitalized consumer credit by allowing working-class consumers to borrow without collateral.

As the 1973-74 school year drew to a close, the Law Council hosted a “Last Tango at Mural Hall” to cap off Law Day celebrations. Cox, the artist behind the murals, attended the black-tie event, which featured music, dancing and an open bar — all for $6 per couple. (Originally, the organizers planned to require men to wear tuxedos. Noting that tux rentals were $15 to $35, they relented: “We welcome you to the Tango[,] nude or dude.”)

New Digs at ‘No-Name Hall’

On Sept. 5, 1974, the new first-year students reported to the new facility on North Grounds. The second- and third-year students continued attending classes at Clark Hall for the first couple of weeks.

“It was one less distraction for us while we were new and trying to figure out what this thing [law school] was,” said Paul B. Stephan ’77, who ultimately figured it out well enough to join the Law School faculty in 1979. “When we started classes, all the foundations and the structure were there, but the floors hadn’t even been put in yet. It was just cement—in the classrooms, the hallways, everywhere.”

The nearest student parking lot was at University Hall, which students accessed by shuttle bus. Attempting it on foot placed one in jeopardy—with no sidewalk, Massie Road was both narrow and muddy, the Law Weekly reported.

The prized air-conditioning system was finicky at best and the boilers weren’t yet operational. Blackboards were missing because the manufacturer went bankrupt over the summer, and a lumber shortage made it difficult to procure furniture, according to the Law Weekly.

While their surroundings were spartan during these early days, this was a generation shaped by Vietnam and largely unfazed by these relatively minor discomforts by comparison. Some, like Guilford “Dudley” Acker Jr. ’77, had served and been wounded in the war, Clark said. Several had flown combat missions.

Stephan himself had drawn a “very low” draft number in the lottery, but was able to defer by attending Yale for college and graduate school.

“Our class was a bit older because we were at the back end of Vietnam — the draft ended my senior year of college,” Stephan said. “One of my best friends in law school had been a marine aviator, and he would always say, ‘Once you’ve taken off from an aircraft carrier in a heavy sea, who gets what grade just doesn’t seem all that important.’”

As Clark put it, “They were a little bit traumatized by war, but also not really fazed by law school.”

Stephan noticed the mud, the tree stumps and the slabs of concrete with sticks of iron rebar. But he was used to the gritty environs of New Haven, so he was more focused on preparing for his turn to be cold-called in Property Law by Professor Emerson Spies.

Stephan was, however, distracted by the female classmate who sat directly in front of him.

“I couldn’t get her to talk to me,” Stephan said. “I think she probably was shy, but I just thought she had very high standards. The ratio of men to women at that time was incredibly high.”

But she did notice him. And as it turns out, nailing the Rule Against Perpetuities was the best thing Stephan could have done to woo Pam Clark, whom he would marry at the start of their third year.

“Normally, Emerson would call on somebody and they’d be on the hook for the whole hour,” Clark recalled. “He started calling on Paul and, after about five minutes, he stopped because there was just no point — he knew it all. Everybody was just looking around like, ‘Whoa.’”

Although the female law student population was growing rapidly, the bathroom situation at the new school still didn’t reflect the needs of female students, Clark recalled.

“They turned one of the men’s rooms into a women’s room, but there were still urinals in there,” she said. “The Law Weekly would joke about having to swab out the urinals in the women’s room.”

As women gained a foothold in the school, another institution got an update in that 1974-75 school year: “Law Wives” changed its name to “Law Partners,” out of respect for the 20 married women in the first-year class. And Virginia Law Women began visiting colleges and universities around the state to talk to undergraduate women interested in attending law school.

It would be years before the complex got its first official name — Withers Hall — but the early classes continued to poke fun at the school’s lack of a meaningful name or monumental architecture. They referred to the imposing brick-paved span between the law and business schools as “Red Square” and “Lenin’s Tomb.” (Later, Withers Hall was sometimes called “Withers High.”)

They suffered from a bit of an “edifice complex,” Clark joked. “It was ‘No-Name Hall’ for years.”

In December, students gathered in the first-floor concourse of what is now the Walter Brown building for a semiformal “Boogie in No-Name Hall,” sponsored by Delta Theta Phi. In contrast to the last tangoes across Clark’s travertine floors, the partiers danced the night away on a floor checkered with bland linoleum tiles.

In January, No-Name’s first three graduates picked up their degrees from the University of Virginia School of Law: Robert Bozarth, Thomas Crumplar and Charles Eden.

Future Dean John C. Jeffries Jr. graduated from the Clark Hall facility in 1973 and joined the faculty at the new campus in January 1975. He found the new environs “pretty bleak,” particularly the lack of landscaping.

“It looked like an elementary school where they had run out of money before they got to the gymnasium,” he said. “They had put aside no money at all for landscaping — it was literally zero — so the Law School and the business school were on seas of mud.”

Shortly thereafter, Jeffries served on a faculty committee, along with Spies and Daniel Meador, to raise funds for landscaping.

By late April 1975, the faculty approved the $4 million Phase II addition, which would add 60,000 square feet using private funds. The plans included a 468-seat auditorium, lockers and additional library space, and a new Oceans Law and Policy Center. The addition was built over the course of the 1977-78 school year, under Dean Emerson Spies, and opened in January 1979.

Ballenger, from the Class of 1969, reappeared then, teaching classes from 1979 to 1982. Even with the Phase II additions, the contrast from Clark Hall was dizzying for her — and only one metaphorical step above Jeffries’ perception: “It was like leaving a historic, beautiful, special place and going back to junior high school,” Ballenger said.

That would change.

In 1990, the business school decided to build a new Darden Grounds, allowing the Law School to purchase its neighboring building. Three years later, Dean Robert Scott selected architecture firm Ayers Saint Gross to connect the two buildings and bring back the grandeur of Clark Hall, relying entirely on the generosity of alumni who contributed to the 1992-2000 capital campaign.

The front entrance, the Clay Hall enclosure connecting the fronts of the original law and business buildings, now bears the same Leslie Buckler inscription as the lintel above Clark Hall. Just inside the entrance lies Jeffries’ favorite addition, the grand Caplin Pavilion, a sparkling event space far more befitting of visiting luminaries than the Clark Hall basement.

Scott Commons, the community space extending from Hunton Andrews Kurth Hall, quite literally recreated the look and feel of Mural Hall: a two-story room with a gabled glass roof. Undaunted by divided opinions over Clark Hall’s infamous artwork, alum John D. Fowler ’55 spearheaded a project to recreate a section of the murals in Hunton Andrews Kurth Hall, where they have been displayed since 2008.

Ballenger — who had always appreciated the murals — returned to the school in 2005, taking over as assistant dean for student affairs. (Her older son, Professor Scott Ballenger ’96, now leads the Appellate Litigation Clinic, and her younger son, Matthew T. Ballenger ’02, is an administrative judge with the U.S. Department of the Interior.)

“I remember when I came back the second time, I thought to myself, ‘Yes, this was worth it,’” Ballenger said. “As much as I missed the ambience of Central Grounds, this was all worth it.”