Law Archives - Page 2 of 18

Hattie Kendrick

American teacher and civil rights activist

Jane Webb was a free, mixed-race woman in colonial Virginia who sued her husband’s enslaver when he refused to live up to the terms of a contract that would have freed her husband and the bound Webb children.

Margaret Brent

Margaret Brent was one of the earliest residents of Westmoreland County, Virginia, where she owned a sizable estate named Peace plantation and helped to establish Virginia’s first Roman Catholic community.

Odessa Pittard Bailey

Odessa Pittard Bailey was a civic leader in western Virginia.

Mary Aggie

Mary Aggie was an enslaved woman who became a principal in a court case that changed Virginia‘s statute law.

Thomasin Hall

Thomas(in) Hall was an intersex individual who lived in seventeenth century Virginia.

Ruth Harvey Charity

Ruth LaCountess Harvey Wood Charity was a civil rights activist and defense attorney.

Frances Farmer

Frances Farmer was a law librarian and the first female law professor at the University of Virginia.

Elizabeth Key Grinstead

Elizabeth Key was a principal in one of the important early court cases that shaped the evolving law of slavery in seventeenth-century Virginia.

Carrie Buck

Carrie Buck was the first person involuntarily sterilized under Virginia’s eugenics laws. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Virginia’s law was constitutional and that Buck should be sterilized, the first of approximately 8,300 performed under state law between 1927 and 1972.