St. George Tucker (July 10, 1752 – November 10, 1827) was a Bermudian-born American lawyer, military officer and professor who taught law at the College of William & Mary. He strengthened the requirements for a law degree at the college, as he believed lawyers needed deep educations. He served as a judge of the General Court of Virginia and later on the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals (now the Supreme Court of Virginia).
Following the American Revolutionary War, Tucker supported the gradual emancipation of slaves, which he proposed to the state legislature in a pamphlet published in 1796. He wrote an American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England that became a valuable reference work for many American lawyers and law students in the early 19th century. President James Madison in 1813 appointed Tucker as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Virginia, later serving on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Many of his descendants became notable lawyers, professors and politicians.
Tucker was born near Port Royal, Bermuda, to English colonists Anne Butterfield (d. 1797) and Colonel Henry Tucker (1713–1787). His father was the great-grandson of George Tucker, who emigrated to Bermuda from England in 1662. The Tuckers were well-regarded in Port Royal. St. George's older brother Thomas Tudor Tucker migrated to Virginia in the 1760s after completing medical school in Scotland, and settled in South Carolina before the American Revolutionary War. Another brother was Henry Tucker, the President of the Council of Bermuda and occasional acting Governor of Bermuda. Another famous relative was his cousin George Tucker, a politician and writer, who was helped by him at the beginning of his career. The name St. George had been in the family since his great-great-grandfather George Tucker married Frances St. George.
As a young man of 19, Tucker moved to the Colony of Virginia in 1772 to study law under George Wythe. Upon arriving in Williamsburg, Tucker entered the College of William & Mary, where he was a member of the F.H.C. Society. After six months at the college, Tucker took private law lessons from Wythe. Tucker passed the bar on April 4, 1774, on the verge of the American Revolutionary War.
In 1774, as tensions with London increased, many Virginia county courts closed in response to the Stamp Act, as did the General Court of Virginia in 1775 (and did not re-open for three years). Tucker needed to find alternatives to practicing law in Virginia. Tucker returned to Bermuda and obtained an attorney's and solicitor's license there, but was not able to drum up much business. Tucker joined his father and his brother Thomas in a business smuggling goods between the West Indies and the American colonies in Virginia and South Carolina.
During the American Revolutionary War, Tucker was commissioned into the Virginia militia as a major under the command of General Robert Lawson; Lawson's troops joined Nathanael Greene's army in North Carolina. Tucker distinguished himself at the Battle of Guilford Court House, where he was wounded in the leg while trying to stop a fleeing Virginian soldier. After recovering, Tucker returned as a lieutenant colonel under Lawson. At the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, an exploding shell wounded Tucker, who was serving as an interpreter for Governor and General Thomas Nelson Jr. and his French allies.
Tucker resumed his fledgling legal career in Virginia after the Revolution's end in 1782, when the United States achieved independence. He began practicing before the Chesterfield County Court in 1783. The Virginia Court of Admiralty admitted Tucker to its bar in 1785, and the General Court of Virginia in Richmond did likewise in 1786.
The Virginian bench, bar, and government soon took notice of Tucker. In 1782 he presented an amicus argument before the Virginia Court of Appeals in the case of Commonwealth v. Caton (a.k.a. The Case of the Prisoners), one of the earliest American cases discussing judicial review. In Caton, Tucker argued for the courts' rights to exercise judicial review, based on the separation of powers doctrine. A pamphlet Tucker wrote in 1785 argued for a common American commercial policy and earned Tucker a position as one of Virginia's delegates to the Annapolis Convention, along with James Madison and Edmund Randolph. By 1787, the governor asked Tucker to substitute for the Attorney General before the Court of Appeals in the case of Commonwealth v. Posey, in which a county magistrate appealed his arson conviction for burning down the county jail and clerk's office.
Tucker was elected to the College of William & Mary's Board of Visitors in 1782. He attended many meetings, and protected the college's curriculum from conservative clergy on the board. Tucker became the college's rector in 1789, When George Wythe resigned in 1790, the Board of Visitors awarded Tucker an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws degree and named him the new professor of law and police at an annual salary of £120.
Tucker used William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England as the basis of his course at the college, but added discussion on how the Commentaries differed from United States law. Tucker also added lectures on principles of United States government, and told his students that the laws passed by United States legislatures, both state and federal, would be more important in his course than the authorities whose treatises were the traditional resources for learning about the English common law. Along those lines, Tucker's course would discuss how civil law principles had replaced common law ones in United States jurisprudence since the Revolution. Tucker's course also discussed other important topics of the day such as the abolition of slavery. Parts of Tucker's lectures showed that states' rights were an important principle to him.
According to historian Clyde N. Wilson, Tucker's principles of states' rights and limited government would be prevailing ideas for him and other Jeffersonians for several generations. Legal historian Paul Finkelman and law professor David Cobin note, though, that Tucker was a "moderate states' rights advocate" and supporter of union, close to the philosophy of people such as John Marshall, and that he opposed concepts such as nullification that would be endorsed by later supporters of states' rights.
Tucker initially arranged his classes into winter and summer sessions to avoid conflict with his judicial service. Originally, Tucker scheduled three-hour lectures three times a week during both sessions, but by 1798 he had added two lectures to the winter session and eliminated the summer session, since not all students would be in Williamsburg then. During sessions, Tucker's students usually read during the times they did not attend lectures. Students were also expected to study outside of sessions by reading the great treatises on English law. Tucker usually had students numbering in the mid-teens, even in the later part of the 1790s, when the college's total attendance was only about 50. Under Tucker's professorship, the college awarded its first Bachelor of Law (LL.B.) degree to William H. Cabell, who would become Governor of Virginia, then General Court judge, and finally a justice of the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia.
During Tucker's time as Professor of Law and Police, students who wished to get a Bachelor of Laws from William & Mary also needed to fulfill the requirements for a Bachelor of Arts, as well as be "acquainted with civil history, both ancient and modern, and particularly with municipal law and police."
Tucker wanted to increase the requirements for a Bachelor of Laws, and so he created a "Plan for Conferring Degrees on the Students of Law in the University of William and Mary". Under Tucker's plan, students would be required to attend two full years' worth of courses, or the majority of three years' worth. Students would be expected to know ancient and modern history, politics, and constitutions (with special emphasis on the Virginia state and United States federal constitutions); and they would also have to "be well-versed in" ethics, municipal laws, and British laws still in effect in Virginia, as well as rules of practice in the Commonwealth. A professor would conduct a closed-book oral exam of the student on a topic of the professor's choosing; if a student passed the professor's exam, the student would apply to practice law before either the County Courts or Court of Appeal of Virginia. If admitted to practice, the student would write a thesis. Once the thesis was approved by the professors and printed, the college would award the student a Bachelor of Laws. Tucker's plan provided for Bachelor of Laws recipients to receive a Master of Arts degree with two more years of residence at the college, or by taking an exam after four years if they were away. Students who received the Bachelor of Laws could also earn a Doctor of Laws degree by taking an exam after four more years of residing and studying at the college, after eight years away from the college, or after five years of practicing before a superior court. Judges and attorneys who practiced before the superior courts of Virginia for at least seven years would be eligible for an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.