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Garrard Glenn

(1878-1949)
Virginia

Garrard Glenn was born in Atlanta, Georgia on 17 August 1878. His parents were Helen Garrard and John Thomas Glenn, a veteran of the Civil War. Garrard received his B.A. in 1899 from the University of Georgia where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Alpha Epsilon. He went to Columbia Law School from which he received an LL.B. in 1903; while a student there he served on the editorial board of the Law Review with John M. Woosley, founder of the Review. Upon graduating he worked five years for Davies, Stone and Auerbach in New York. He then helped establish the firm of Shattuck and Glenn, whose work was rather unusual for a new firm because they were lawyer's lawyers, somewhat comparable to English Barristers.

In 1913 Glenn began lecturing at Columbia and continued there as a part-time associate professor until 1921. He had devised a course called Creditors' Rights which so impressed the Columbia faculty that they hired him to teach it. In early 1927 Glenn turned down the offer of a teaching position at the University of Virginia Law School, but in December he decided to accept. Thus his law practice ended, and his teaching career, which also exceeded 20 years, began. He held the chair as James Monroe Professor of Law from 1929 to 1949 when he died, January 25, six months before his proposed retirement. While at the University, Glenn, a well-loved and respected professor, taught Trusts, Equity, Corporations, Evidence, Creditors' Rights, Security and Insurance.

Garrard Glenn's prolific writing career began while he was a student and extended through the years of ill-health preceding his death. In 1910 he published Secret Liens and in 1915, Creditors' Rights, a major work in an area of the law which he helped bring into focus. World War I prompted him to write The Army and the Law, and in 1931 he published Fraudulent Conveyances. Naturally after he began teaching Glenn had more time for scholarship, and in the thirties and forties his most respected works were written. Glenn on Liquidation appeared in 1935, and the three-volume work, Glenn on Mortgages, was published in 1943. His first casebook, Cases on Creditors' Rights came out in 1940, as did a revised edition of Fraudulent Conveyances, and Cases on Equity, co-authored with Kenneth Redden, appeared in 1946. He served as editorial adviser for Jurisprudence in Virginia and West Virginia and the Restatement of the Law of Security. Glenn produced more than 40 major articles for law reviews across the country and covered topics from creditors' rights to Sir Thomas More, whom he felt should be the patron saint of his profession. While at the University, he served on the faculty committee of the Virginia Quarterly Review and was a faculty advisor to the Virginia Law Review.

In 1909 Glenn married Rosa Aubrey Wood, and they had two sons, Garrard W. and John Forsyth, both of whom received law degrees at the University of Virginia; the sons are often referred to as "Fox" and "Rab", respectively, in the correspondence. The Glenns lived at "Spring Hill" in Ivy, and Glenn did most of his writing in the library of his home. He enjoyed collecting rare books for his personal library and often advised alumni and Frances Farmer about purchases of rare items for the Law Library.