Center for Law and History

The School of Law at Washington and Lee University is proud to sponsor an ongoing, cross-disciplinary initiative: the W&L Center for Law and History.

King's Bench ca. 1450

Washington and Lee University is the natural home for an interdisciplinary center bringing together the fields of law and history. Combining a prestigious liberal arts college with a highly-ranked law school, Washington and Lee University is particularly poised to foster the study of law within its broader humanistic and historical context. The university has nearly twenty professors with sustained scholarly interests in the intersection of law and history, in the departments of art, classics, English, history, philosophy, religion, Romance languages, sociology, and law. Four of these professors are in the School of Law, giving it one of the strongest legal history faculties in the country. Moreover, the library of the Washington and Lee University School of Law contains rich primary materials for the writing of legal history, including the public and private papers of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (B.A. 1929, LL.B. 1931), and the archives of the School of Law, which was founded in 1849 and incorporated within the university in 1866.

To make a gift to the Center or to learn about how you can support the Center, please click here.