Murder in the Shenandoah: A Conversation with Professor Jessica Lowe on Law in Post-Revolution Virginia and Future Chief Justice John Marshall

Jessica Lowe is a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia School of Law where she specializes in 18th- and 19th-century American legal history. She received her J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School and clerked in the District of Connecticut and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Professor Lowe also practiced litigation and appellate law at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., where she worked on a number of cases before the Supreme Court of the United States. She is admitted to practice in Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Professor Lowe received her B.A. with high honors from the University of Virginia (political and social thought, economics) and won the Sorensen Prize for best thesis. She then studied at Yale Divinity School where she was a Marquand Scholar. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Princeton University where her dissertation was awarded the St. George Tucker Society’s Bradford Dissertation Prize for best Southern history dissertation. 

At Virginia, Professor Lowe taught legal history, constitutional history, and classes in crime and punishment. She is the founder of the interdisciplinary Legal History Writing Group and co-coordinates the Law School’s Legal History Workshop series. In 2013, she co-organized a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913). She has also served as a fellow at Brown College, the undergraduate residential college, and is a member of the Early American Studies Colloquium at the International Center for Jefferson Studies.