The Allen Chair at the University of Richmond has brought a diverse collection of scholars and educational opportunities to the Law School since 1982. With donations from his three sons, George E. Allen, Jr., Ashby B. Allen, and Wilbur C. Allen, and the support of the Allen Law Firm, the Chair was endowed to celebrate the legal career of the firm’s founding partner, George E. Allen. The first endowed chair at the University of Richmond School of Law, the funding was used to invite visiting scholars to lecture and eventually it came to support a full-time professor here at the law school.
In 1998, the funding was transitioned from a visiting scholars program to support a full-time faculty member position when renowned constitutional law scholar Rod Smolla was named the Allen Chair Professor of Law. Professor Smolla, who later went on to be President of Furman University and is now Dean of Delaware Law, held the chair until 2010. The position was then awarded to bankruptcy and contracts law professor David Epstein, who holds it to this day.
The school continues to invite visiting scholars on behalf of the Allen Chair via a symposium series organized by the Richmond Law Review members. Scholars speak at a yearly symposium and publish the fruits of their research in an annual Allen Chair edition of the Law Review.
Browse the contents of The Allen Chair Symposium:
- 2015 Series: School Inequality: Challenges and Solutions
- 2014 Series: Lethal Injection, Politics, and the Future of the Death Penalty
- 2013 Series: The Energy-Water Nexus
- 2012 Series: Beyond the Red, Purple, and Blue
- 2011 Series: "Emerging from the Great Recession" and "Everything But the Merits"
- 2010 Series: Vision 2020: A View of Our Energy Future
- 2009 Series: Detaining Suspected Terrorists: Past, Present, and Future
- 2008 Series: Immigration in the 21st Century: Perspectives on Law and Policy
- 2007 Series: Death Penalty in America: Perceptions, Reflection, and Reform
- 2006 Series: Preserving the Chesapeake: Law, Ecology, and the Bay
- 2004 Series: Federal Judicial Selection
- 2002 Series: Terrorism and Assassination: Political Assassination as an Instrument of National Policy - An Inquiry into Operations, Expediency, Morality, and the Law
- 2001 Series: Lawyer advertising in the electronic age
- 2000 Series: Trying Cases in the Media - Legal Ethics, Fair Trials and Free Press
- 1999 Series: Aggressive Newsgathering and the First Amendment
- 1998 Series: Resolving International Environmental Disputes in the 1990s and Beyond
- 1997 Series: The American Corporation in the Twenty-first Century
- 1996 Series: Euclid at Threescore Years and Ten: The Twilight of Environmental and Land-Use Regulation?
- 1995 Series: Special Issues in Bioethics and the Law
- 1994 Series: Human Rights International Law
- 1993 Series: Religion, Morality and The Law
- 1992 Series: Legal Frontiers in Toxic Waste: The Special Issues of Toxic Waste in Indian Country
- 1991 Series: Special Problems in Civil Procedure - Complex Litigation
- 1990 Series: Selected Topics in Tort Law