Keynote Speaker
H
on. John Charles Thomas
Thomas is a retired justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia and a retired Senior Partner of the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth. A native of Norfolk VA, he attended the segregated public schools of that city until 1965 when he enrolled at the formerly all-white Maury High School under the state of Virginia’s so-called “Freedom of Choice School desegregation plan.” He finished Maury as an honor student and entered the University of Virginia in September 1968 as one of three African Americans in the entering class of 1,400 students; at that time the University of Virginia was still all males. Thomas finished UVa in 1972 earning his BA with distinction. Thomas next enrolled in the law school at UVa which he finished in 1975.
In August of 1975 he became the first African American lawyer hired by the formerly all-white Richmond law firm Hunton Williams Gay and Gibson. He started work at the firm as a Public Utilities lawyer as part of the group of lawyers representing the state’s largest power company. Later Thomas became a lawyer in the firm’s litigation section where he represented major corporations in trial court and on appeal. On April 1, 1982, Thomas made partner at Hunton and Williams making him the first African American lawyer in American history to “go up the line” from associate to partner at a formerly all-white Southern law firm.
On April 11, 1983, the Governor Charles Robb appointed Thomas to the Supreme Court of Virginia, thus making Thomas the first African American and, at 32 years of age, the youngest Justice in the history of Virginia. In late 1989 a medical problem caused Thomas to leave the court. In November 1989, Thomas returned to the Hunton law firm as Chief of the Appellate Practice group. He remained at the firm until his retirement in 2021.
Thomas has served on the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee of the American Arbitration Association. Since 2004 he has been a judge of the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne Switzerland which rules on violations of the World Anti-doping Code for all Olympic sports, for the Tour de France, and for FIFA.
Thomas served on the Board of Visitors of the College of William and Mary from 2006 to 2017. He has lectured at the Interim University Center in Dubrovnik, Croatia on “Enforcing Interim Arbitral Awards Under the New York Convention”; he has twice delivered the Constitutional Law lecture to the Firsties at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He has also delivered the “First-Day, First Year” lectures at the University of Virginia School of Law and the College of William & Mary School of Law since. He has taught Appellate Advocacy at the University of Virginia School of Law. In 2019 he was the “Jurist in Residence” at the Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, WA. Thomas is an honorary Trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation that owns and operates Monticello. He is the author of “The Poetic Justice” his memoir, which was published in October 2022.
