An Introduction to Wythe's Reports

Some of the United States' Founders are better-known than others. Washington and Jefferson are always present in the popular mind. Before Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical, asking the average modern American about Alexander Hamilton would likely get a mumbled reply about the ten-dollar bill. One of the more obscure Founders is George Wythe, the College of William & Mary's first law professor. Today, if anyone encounters Wythe, it is usually as a supporting character in other Founders' stories: as mentor, teacher, and friend to Jefferson; or as a committee chair calling for Virginia to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

Wythe, however, was much more than a bit player in the United States's early days. He was America's first law professor, a man of great integrity who greatly influenced some of the fledgling country's most important figures with jurisprudential ideas that were often ahead of their time. Why do Americans not know more about this professor (first in the United States), judge, delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and signer of the Declaration of Independence? Part of the issue may be a lack of documentation. Thomas Jefferson said he had often seen Wythe toss the documents he created while working on a case into the fire upon the case's conclusion. In the early 19th century, state printer Thomas Ritchie obtained the notes Wythe made as William & Mary's Professor of Law and Police, and considered publishing them. Virginia Governor John Tyler, Sr., asked Jefferson to edit the collection. Jefferson declined, saying that it had been far too long since he had practiced law and he could not give Wythe's papers the treatment they deserved. Wythe's notes have since scattered to places unknown. For more information on the fate of Wythe's personal papers, see the Wythepedia article Wythe's Lost Papers.

We do, however, have the collection of decisions he handed while sitting on the bench of Virginia's High Court of Chancery. Wythe compiled a book of these cases, now known as Wythe's Reports. Several decades after Wythe died, Benjamin Blake Minor edited a second edition of the Reports that added some more decisions Wythe had arranged to be published after the first edition came out.

The Reports contain cases that Wythe heard as Virginia's High Chancellor, the judge who sat on the commonwealth's High Court of Chancery. The High Court of Chancery was a court of equity. In the Anglo-American legal system, equity developed as an alternative set of remedies to the common law system; equity was supposed to provide a soultion when the common law outcome would not provide proper justice. In the early days of the United States, many states had separate courts to hear equity cases. These days, in almost all states, the same court handles equitable and legal remedies. Equity cases usually involved property, contract, and inheritance disputes, so those are the cases the reader will find in Wythe's Reports. Wythepedia has created pages for each of the decisions in the Reports; each page summarizes the case and its background, and explains references to sources that Wythe makes in the cases. We can think of Wythe's Reports as his version of a casebook, the textbooks that modern law students are familiar with. Just like 21st-century casebooks, Wythe excerpts and summarizes the court's decisions, sometimes including subsequent appeals to other courts, then comments on them. Wythe hopes that the reader, by reading Wythe's commentaries on the courts' decisions, will reach a better understanding of the law as it was in Virginia and how Wythe thought it should be.

Wythe expected much of his students, and his Reports demands a lot from its reader. Wythe frequently cited or alluded to Ancient Greek and Latin works (often in their original language, with no English translation), as well as more recent classic authors such as Cervantes, Dante, and Shakespeare. He frequently used shorthand references and terms of art that lawyers of his era would understand, but which 21st-century readers may find baffling. Wythe frequently left out information such as how the case arrived before him or facts that Wythe found irrelevant to the point he was trying to make (often, if a Wythe decision was appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court, that higher court's opinion would be a better source for the facts of the case, or even what happened in Wythe's court).

Properly understanding Wythe's decisions also means knowing their historical context. Many of the cases Wythe heard involved property, probate, and contract disputes, which were influenced by events that were familiar to educated people in Wythe's day but are esoteric history to modern Americans. Wythe also believed that Roman law principles were sometimes superior to English legal precedent, and cautioned against blindly following the mother country's caselaw. Wythe believed (as did numerous other lawyers around that time) that as a new country, the United States might wish to follow European-style civil law principles rather than Anglo common law. Another important piece of subtext lurking within Wythe's Reports are its author's long rivalry with Edmund Pendleton, President of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Wythe had arguably the most brilliant jurisprudential mind of his generation, and he was rarely defeated before the bench. The gregarious Pendleton, however, was a master litigator and one of the few people capable of defeating Wythe in court. As President of the Supreme Court, Pendleton reversed several of Wythe's decisions.

Wythepedia articles on the cases in Wythe's Reports summarize the case, and include notes and links to useful articles that can better explain the conflict and reasoning in the case. Wythepedia also includes several articles to fill in the background behind a number of these decisions. Our article on Land Disputes in Western Virginia explains a major cause behind many of the cases Wythe heard involving real estate. Contract arguments in the post-Revolutionary era often centered around the instability of Virginia's economy before, during, and after the war; Virginia Hyperinflation and Debt explains. Several of the property and probate cases illustrated the poor legal position Virginian women found themselves in; Women’s Legal Rights in Wythe’s Time describes their situation. Wythepedia's entry on Edmund Pendleton explains his rivalry with Wythe.

Wythe's Reports can be a treatise on Virginia law and equity, a snapshot of life in Virginia during the late 18th century, and a profile of one of this nation's most underappreciated Founders. Wythepedia is proud to make them available, and we hope you find our case summaries useful.