G. Edward White

G. Edward White

David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law and University Professor, University of Virginia

White is the author of seventeen books, on subjects ranging from legal and constitutional history to judicial biography to the life of Alger Hiss to baseball. His most recent books are Law in American History: Volume Two, From Reconstruction Through the 1920s, American Legal History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2014) and Law in American History: Volume One, From the Colonial Years Through the Civil War (Oxford, 2012). He is also the editor of the John Harvard Library edition of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Common Law (2009).

His books have won numerous awards, including final listing for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1968; three Silver Gavel Awards from the American Bar Association; the 1989 James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association; the 1993 Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association; and the 1996 Triennial Coif Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Association of American Law Schools.

White is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians. He is a member of the bars of Virginia, the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court of the United States. He received his B.A. from Amherst College, his Ph.D.in American Studies from Yale, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He was law clerk to Chief Justice Warren of the Supreme Court of the United States for the 1971 Term. He joined the law faculty of the University of Virginia in 1972, became a University Professor in 1993, and became David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law in 2003. His courses include Constitutional Law, Torts, and Legal History. He is currently working on Volume Three of Law in American History, covering the years from 1930 to 2000.