Having Shaped Constitutions and Minds Since 1964, A.E. Dick Howard To Retire

He would recognize the Rev. Leslie Griffin and his daughter, who convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to order all Virginia public schools to reopen and desegregate 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

He’d spot Clarence Gideon winning the right to counsel for indigent defendants; Virginia voting Jim Crow and sex discrimination out of its constitution; protests in Central and Eastern European town squares; the fall of the Berlin Wall; nascent European democracies; and so much more.

Howard has traveled and served the world at large, helping to write dozens of democratic constitutions – including a 1971 rewrite of Virginia’s own constitution – without moving out of his native Virginia or leaving the Law School he calls home.

“Many of the most amazing things that have happened to me were not part of my original game plan,” Howard said in his Tidewater accent, sipping tea in a Queen Anne armchair as he reflected. “But from the first day I stepped into the classroom, I knew I was where I ought to be. It hasn’t changed in 60 years.”

His constitutional ideals, his home and his aesthetics reflect the Age of Enlightenment. He trusts in the “fundamental values” and “extraordinary insights” of the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution and believes they intended to leave room for future generations to change and perfect the document’s defects.

Howard, pictured in 2017, worked with then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe on the restoration of voting rights to former felons in 2016.

“It’s a basic model with some obvious flaws – it was drafted by propertied white men, many of whom were slaveowners. Women and Blacks were not at the table,” Howard said. “But they worked under the Enlightenment idea that there are enduring truths.”

When he formally retires from teaching at the end of the semester, he will be the longest-serving professor in UVA history, with 60 years in the classroom. He can look back with confidence that he has inspired generations of lawyers and judges who have gone out into the world and – on national and international stages alike – nurtured those democratic ideals.

Read on to learn more about Howard’s incredible career and the multiple impacts of his life’s work.