Through most of the second half of the nineteenth century, lawyers were
"licensed" to practice by being examined by any two judges of courts of
record in the Commonwealth of Virginia, being of at least 21 years of
age and of "honest demeanor." Once licensed, each attorney would
"qualify" by appearing before the judge or judges of the courts in which
that person wished to practice. In 1896, the VA General Assembly passed
a law backed by the Virginia State Bar Association that required the
Supreme Court of Appeals to license future members of the bar, which
then created a bar examination, the first of which was given on January
8, 1897. The Virginia Board of Bar Examiners was established in 1910 to
relieve the court of this burdensome task.
For all this see the Code of Virginia for 1873 and 1887, along with the
appropriate acts of assembly, but more generally Bryson and Shepard, The
Virginia Bar, 1870-1900, in Gawalt, ed., The New High Priests: Lawyers
in Post-Civil War America (1984), 171-186.
E. Lee Shepard
Director of Manuscripts and
Archives
Virginia Historical Society
P.O. Box 7311
Richmond, VA 23221
804-342-9670
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ted Delaney
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2008 12:12 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Lawyers in 19th-Century Virginia
Does anyone know how lawyers were officially admitted to the Virginia
bar in the late 1800s? More specifically, what primary source would
document those admissions? I would love to find a chronological list of
admissions in the 1870s and 1880s.
I have tried both the Virginia State Bar (vsb.org), which wasn't
established until 1938, and the Library of Virginia, but neither place
seems to have these records.
Many thanks,
Ted Delaney
Archivist & Curator
Old City Cemetery Museums
Lynchburg, Virginia
gravegarden.org
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