Inventory of the Papers of Armistead Mason Dobie

Armistead Mason Dobie was born 15 April 1881 to Mary Kearns Cooke and Richard Augustus Dobie of Norfolk, Virginia. Armistead entered the University of Virginia and earned three degrees in rapid succession: B.A. in 1901, M.A. in 1902, and LL.B in 1904. He left Charlottesville to practice law in St. Louis, Missouri, but returned to his alma mater in 1907 to teach law and to re-establish the close ties with the University which he would maintain the rest of his life. When Dobie joined the faculty, he assumed the teaching duties of Dean William M. Lile, who was temporarily absent due to ill health. Lile returned, and Dobie remained on the faculty, becoming a full professor in 1909.

World War I claimed Dobie's service in 1917. He was commissioned a captain in the U. S. Army and became an aide to General Cronkhite, with whom he went to France. Before the war was over, Dobie was promoted to major and was made assistant to the chief of staff of the 80th Infantry Division. He was recommended for the D. S. O., and the French honored him by making him an Officier of the Order of Academic Palms.

After the war was over, Dobie returned to Charlottesville, but instead of teaching, he served for a year as the Executive Director of the University's drive for the Centennial Endowment Fund. The following year, Dobie went to Harvard Law School and began work on an S.J. D. In the summer of 1922, Dobie studied at Columbia's Graduate School of Jurisprudence, returning to Charlottesville in time to begin the fall term.

At the time Dobie joined the faculty, the law school program increased from a mandatory two to three years. Dobie taught three required courses --criminal law, federal procedure, and probate and administration- - and six electives --Roman law, master and servant, carriers and bailments, code pleading, public officers, and taxation and tax titles. Upon his return from Harvard, Dobie began employing the case method. Young faculty members followed Dobie's lead. With Dean Lile's retirement in 1932, Dobie was appointed dean of the Law School and served in that position until 1939, although ill health in 1936 caused him to relinquish the dean's duties for year or so.

Armistead Dobie wrote a definitive work on the law of bailments and carriers, a widely respected casebook and several treatises on federal jurisdiction and procedure, and numerous articles for the Virginia, Harvard, and Yale law reviews. In the mid-1930's he was appointed special assistant to the U. S. Attorney General, and served for over twenty years. He also served as legal advisor to the Conflict of Laws Section of the American Law Institute, and was appointed by the U. S. Supreme Court to a committee of 14 to make procedure in federal districts courts uniform nationwide.

In May of 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt offered Dobie the newly created judgeship on the U. S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, with the promise that he might move to the Fourth Circuit when vacancy occurred. Dobie accepted. True to his word, Roosevelt appointed him to the Fourth Circuit Court only six months later.

From early in 1940 until the first of February 1956, Armistead Dobie served on the Fourth Circuit Court with Senior Judges John J. Parker and Morris A. Soper. Dobie heard almost 1400 cases during his 16 years on the Circuit Court bench, and wrote over 450 opinions; he dissented from his colleagues on six occasions, and was upheld by the Supreme Court in four of those opinions.

The most historically significant cases Dobie heard were those involving school segregation. The decisions he helped reach on these cases reflected his firm belief that African Americans should have facilities as nearly equal to whites as possible, and his reluctance or disinclination to go against the segregation pattern established by Plessy v. Ferguson.

Judge Dobie officially retired from the bench on the first of February 1956 in poor health. After many months of complete rest, he recovered somewhat, and on 18 July 1958, he married a long-time Charlottesville friend, Elizabeth McKenny. He lived out the rest of his life at their home in Charlottesville, dying at 81 on 8 August 1962.