Law

In mid-July 1925 much of the nation's attention was focused on the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching about evolution. Four months earlier, the Tennessee General Assembly had overwhelmingly passed a bill…

Fred Thompson, U.S. senator, Watergate committee counsel, and movie actor, was born August 19, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. He grew up in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, the son of a used car dealer, and attended Lawrence County High School. He graduated from…

William B. Turley was called "the most brilliant judge we ever had" by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Horace H. Lurton of Tennessee. (1) This reputation was forged during fifteen years on the Tennessee Supreme Court as part of the legendary…

Governor and State Supreme Court Justice Peter Turney was born in Jasper, Marion County, in 1827, the son of Hopkins and Teresa Francis Turney. He attended local schools in Franklin County and a private school in Nashville and read law,…

Nashville attorney and vocal opponent of woman suffrage and prohibition, John J. Vertrees was born in Sumner County on June 16, 1850. He attended Cumberland University and read law with W. S. Monday before being admitted to the bar. Vertrees…

Hugh Lawson White was a U.S. senator whose 1836 presidential candidacy helped to establish the Whig Party both in Tennessee and in the South. The son of General James White, the founder of Knoxville, White briefly served as private secretary…

A powerful advocate for African Americans, Avon N. Williams Jr. became the leading African American lawyer in Tennessee in the protection and advancement of the rights of blacks in education, the workplace, criminal justice, and voting. Born in 1921 in…

Jurist and historian Samuel Cole Williams was born in Gibson County in 1864 and educated in the schools of Humboldt. Encouraged by Judge Horace Lurton--a family friend and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice--he enrolled in the Vanderbilt University law…

Civil rights lawyer and Memphis businessman A. W. Willis Jr. was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 16, 1925. Willis received his B.A. from Talladega College in 1950 and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1953. He…

William F. Yardley, an influential and powerful advocate for the legal rights of blacks, was the first African American to run for governor of Tennessee. Yardley was born in 1844, the child of a white mother and a black father…