St. George Tucker was born in Bermuda on this date in history, and traveled to Virginia to study law at the College of William and Mary in 1771. Short of money, he left the college at the end of 1772 and began an apprenticeship in the office of George Wythe, the eminent lawyer who mentored many prominent young Virginians, including Thomas Jefferson. On April 4, 1774, Tucker was admitted to the Virginia bar.
As the Encyclopedia of Virginia reports:
Although admitted to practice at the bar of Virginia’s General Court in April 1775, Tucker returned to Bermuda in June and used his social and professional ties in Virginia to negotiate contracts for smuggled goods. With financial support from several prominent Virginians, including the president of the Council of State, the Tuckers and another Bermuda shipping family transported salt, sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, and munitions between America, the Caribbean, and Europe from 1776 to 1779. Business was profitable until the British became more skilled at intercepting company ships. Wildly fluctuating prices of goods in wartime also hurt the bottom line.”
Thus he gave up his smuggling career, moved to Virginia, got married, and joined the Virginia militia. When the Revolution ended, he finally settled into a career as a lawyer. In 1788 he was appointed a judge of Virginia’s General Court. In 1790, when George Wythe resigned his professorship at the College of William and Mary, Tucker was named the college’s new Professor of Law and Police.
Portrait of St. George Tucker by Charles B.J.F. de Saint-Mémin
The Virginia Encyclopedia relates:
Although he had learned the law by apprenticing in an office, Tucker now advocated a more formal, academic study of the discipline. He lectured primarily using his own marginal notes to the four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone (1765–1769). In 1803, he published a five-volume edition of the Commentaries based on these notes and lectures, which sought in part to identify where English and American law converged and diverged. Dubbed Tucker’s “American Blackstone,” it was the first major treatise on American law and was frequently cited by the U.S. Supreme Court during the nineteenth century.”
During this same period, he also, along with a group of other Virginians, took part in rewriting Virginia’s laws. The revised code of 1792, contained 150 chapters, including the Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Constitution of 1776.
In 1796, Tucker published A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of It, In the State of Virginia, which you can read online here, but the Virginia General Assembly apparently ignored it. (Tucker seems to have ignored it as well since he did not even free his own slaves.)
Tucker took his seat as a judge on the Virginia Court of Appeals in 1806. He resigned from the Court of Appeals on April 2, 1811, in part because of increasing conflict between him and his fellow judge, and because he objected to the workload. Two years later, President James Madison nominated Tucker to the federal district court in Virginia. The U.S. Senate confirmed him on January 19, 1813. He heard cases twice a year both at Norfolk and Richmond and also sat with Chief Justice John Marshall twice a year on the United States Circuit Court when it met in Richmond. In 1819, the district was split into eastern and western halves, with Tucker joining the bench of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Tucker’s health problems meant that he occasionally missed some sessions and he resigned on June 30, 1825.
Tucker had a stroke and died on November 10, 1827.
Importantly, Tucker took careful notes about all his cases. The Encyclopedia observes:
The extensive collection of arguments, opinions, memoranda, correspondence, and other records of his personal archive is a unique and invaluable resource for understanding the evolution of common law in Virginia and the new nation after the Revolution.”
Legal Legacy 
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