When Virginia lawmakers wanted to overhaul its Jim Crow-era constitution 50 years ago, Professor A. E. Dick Howard ’61 of the University of Virginia School of Law answered the call.

He served as executive director of the Commission on Constitutional Revision and directed the successful referendum campaign for the new constitution's ratification, which took effect in 1971.

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the current Virginia Constitution, which went into effect in 1971. A.E. Dick Howard, the Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of Law at University of Virginia School of Law, led the revision of the modern-day Constitution. It largely repudiated the white supremacy legacy of the 1902 Constitution.

In 1968, Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr. appointed a Commission on Constitutional Revision. Howard served as the commission's executive director, and then was counsel to the General Assembly when it reviewed the commission's report. The proposed constitution went before Virginia voters in 1970, and Howard directed the successful referendum campaign. He also is the author of the two-volume "Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia."

This is the first of a two-part series about the development of the 1971 Constitution. The next installment will be published on Sun., Dec. 27. When the delegates to Virginia's constitutional convention gathered in Richmond in 1901, hatred for everything that Reconstruction had accomplished permeated the debates.

Jean Hardiman, "Toward Greater Equality: In 1968-1970 Virginia's Leading Legal Minds Came Together to Revise the Constitution," VBA Journal (Fall 2020), pp.19-21.

A.E. Dick Howard, “50 Years On: Does Virginia’s 1971 Constitution Still Meet the Challenge,” VBA Journal (Fall 2020), pp. 17-18.