Law School Deans

From its beginnings in 1779 as the first law school in the new nation to the present, the deans of the William & Mary Law School have been leaders and innovators in American legal education. The stage was set by our first professor, George Wythe, who was asked by his former student Thomas Jefferson to begin a program of formal legal education at the College. Wythe was succeeded by St. George Tucker, who had read law under Wythe, and who would during his tenure at William & Mary author the seminal work known as Tucker’s Blackstone, the most important American legal treatise in the early 19th Century. Today the law school is led by A. Benjamin Spencer who, as scholar, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and a leader in public service, is fully poised to lead William & Mary into the future..

Additional information about the history of the William & Mary Law School is available here.

Directories of Faculty and Administrative personnel, with their tenure, of the William & Mary Law School are available here.