War Years

War

Years

FRANCES FARMER, C. 1944

Student enrollment at UVA Law dipped significantly during World War II. Four women graduated from the Law School in 1945 out of a class of only 21 students, on par with national figures.

UVA Law staff saw the war years as an opportunity to prepare the school for postwar growth. Frances Farmer, the first woman to teach at UVA Law, began at the Law School in 1942 as a senior library cataloguer in the library with such a mindset. Farmer was a lawyer by training and had earned her LL.B. in 1935 as the only woman in her class at T.C. Williams School of Law. She chose law librarianship over firm work. Farmer completed a law librarianship course at Columbia University and was appointed law librarian at the University of Richmond in 1938.

When Farmer arrived at UVA Law in July 1942, she oversaw a major overhaul of the library’s classification and acquisition procedures. At the time, the library had fewer than 40,000 books, all of them uncatalogued. Wartime demands complicated her cataloging plan. The War Production Board requisitioned the typewriters Farmer had rented. Then the War Department’s School of Military Government moved into the Law School, forcing Farmer and her staff to adapt hallways into a cataloging room and book truck thoroughfares. Farmer still completed the project on time. In 1944, she was appointed Law Librarian in recognition of her supervisory accomplishment. Under her leadership, the UVA Law Library grew to 100,000 cataloged volumes in the early 1950s.

Farmer taught legal bibliography and gained full faculty status at UVA Law in 1968, becoming the Law School’s first woman professor of law. She retired in August 1976 and was designated professor emerita by the UVA Board of Visitors. ALICE BURKE ’26 ACCEPTS COMMAND OF THE WAVES BARRACKS AT BALBOA PARK IN SAN FRANCISCO.

POSTWAR LAWYERS

At war’s end, service members—men and women—returned from duty and began to bolster the Law School’s numbers once again. Margaret Gordon ’50 entered the Law School after her service in the Women’s Army Corps and went on to join the Law Review editorial board and be the first woman inducted into UVA Law’s chapter of the Phi Delta Epsilon fraternity. Meanwhile, alumnae lawyers served at both the Tokyo and Nuremburg war crimes trials. Alice Burke ’26 achieved BETTY BLAIR DENIT STEWART ’45 the rank of lieutenant com- WITH HER HUSBAND mander in the Women’s Reserve of the U.S. Naval Reserve (WAVES) and later acted as defense counsel at the International Military Tribunal in Tokyo. Betty Blair Denit Stewart ’45, a former editor of the Virginia Law Review, clerked for the chief justice of the occupation court system at the Nuremberg Trials.