About St. George Tucker

St. George Tucker was a man of many parts–lawyer, judge, scholar, scientist, essayist, poet, and playwright. He came to Virginia from Bermuda in 1771 to enter the College of William and Mary. He also read law under George Wythe, whom he succeeded as professor of law at the College in 1790. Tucker is best known for his edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803), which was the leading American law text of its day. Through this work, Tucker became an influential spokesman for a Southern jurisprudence of states’ rights and strict construction that stood opposed to the nationalist jurisprudence of John Marshall. Tucker served at every level of Virginia’s court system from county court lawyer to judge of the state Court of Appeals and spent the last dozen years of his career as a federal judge. An important legacy of his legal career was the vast corpus of papers he generated as a working lawyer and judge from the 1780s to the 1820s. These documents are now housed in the Tucker-Coleman Collection in Swem Library at the College of William and Mary. Tucker’s legal manuscripts include notes of arguments, opinions, correspondence, memoranda, pleadings, dockets, and numerous other papers relating to the cases he argued and heard in the various courts.

The heart of the collection of Tucker’s law papers is a set of law reports that he entered into notebooks and had bound into three manuscript volumes, which he titled “Notes of Certain Cases in the General Court, District Courts, and Court of Appeals in Virginia, from the year 1786 to 1811.”  From 1813 to 1824 Tucker also reported cases in the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Circuit Court.

Tucker’s legacy also endures in the eighteenth-century house bearing his name in Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area where visitors can see Tucker’s home and learn more about his life and contributions to the new nation’s legal system.  Thus, the Tucker Papers will provide important information not only for historians and scholars but also for the general public who visit his Williamsburg home.