User:Swvalaw

A few years ago, I was a member of the Board of Governments of the Virginia Bar Association. At that time, and perhaps now, they had a list of former presidents on their website. I started reading about them, and became interested in a number of things about them. One of them was how many of them were involved in the Civil War, and how many were informed in the post-Reconstruction Constitutional Convention of 1901, that led to the 1902 Constitution. Another thing I was interested in was the connections between them and people I know, or people I know about, or the Southwest Virginia area. For example, a Norfolk lawyer named Robert M. Hughes was the son of a federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia named Robert W. Hughes, who is buried in Sinking Springs Cemetery in Abingdon, here in Southwest Virginia. Some of the articles I wrote have been severely whacked by others on Wikipedia, who didn't think these connections were very interesting. Some of the ones that there should be Wikipedia articles about include William Minor Lile, who was the first dean of the U.Va. Law school, and Eppa Hunton, but these are people of whom so much is known and so little of it is known by me that I have hesitated to do any of it myself. Similarly, I have been interested in the judges of the W.D. Va., and written or contributed to a number of the pages about them, but hesitate to write much about the judges who serve now or have served recently.