Raleigh Colston Minor

Background

Raleigh Colston Minor was born on January 24, 1869, at the University of Virginia. He was the son of John Barbee Minor and Anne Jacqueline Fisher (Colston).

Education

After studying under tutors and in private schools, Minor entered the University of Virginia in 1883 at the age of fourteen. He received his baccalaureate degree at eighteen, his master's degree one year later, and graduated in law in 1890.

Career

Following admission to the bar, Minor practised in Richmond for three years and then returned to the University of Virginia as assistant professor of law, being a colleague of his father. After the latter's death the son, in 1895, became adjunct professor and in 1899 was made professor. He taught for three decades, the overlapping teaching careers of father and son covering a period of seventy-eight years, a unique record of unbroken family service in the same school of the same university. His principal subjects were real property, constitutional law, conflict of laws, and international law. His book on The Law of Real Property appeared in 1908. Although based on the second volume of his father's Institutes, it was none the less an original work and became an outstanding authority in Virginia. In 1910, collaborating with Prof. John Wurts of Yale, he published a smaller edition dealing less with Virginia law and hence more suitable for use in other localities. For more than fifteen years, in addition to his classes in the University of Virginia, he delivered lectures on conflict of laws at Georgetown University. His last writing was A Republic of Nations (1918).

Achievements

• Minor stands as one of America's three pioneers in the field of private international law or, as Justice Story named it, the conflict of laws. In 1901, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved international recognition by the publication of his Conflict of Laws, an American legal classic, which materially clarified the existing chaotic condition of that difficult branch of jurisprudence, and placed subsequent writers on the subject largely in his debt. Written before the Armistice, his book was a thoughtful humanitarian's unequivocal and forward-looking contribution toward the solution of a baffling problem. Minor was also the author of The Law of Tax Titles in Virginia (1898) and Notes on the Science of Government and the Relations of the States to the United States (1913).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Law of Real Property: Based on Minor's Institutes (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Law of Real Property: Based on Minor's I...)

  • A Republic of Nations: A Study of the Organization of a Federal League of Nations

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Law of Real Property, Vol. 2 of 2: Based on Minor's Institutes (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Law of Real Property, Vol. 2 of 2: Based...)

Religion

An Episcopalian, he had a broad and tolerant religious outlook.

Views

Impressed by the tremendous failure of public opinion as a preventive of war and recognizing that any world tribunal would have jurisdiction over justiciable disputes only, whereas war results primarily from political questions, he deemed that the path to permanent peace lies in the formation of a union of nations to which its members would relinquish for joint administration their war-breeding political powers the regulation of international commerce, the acquisition of territory, and the treatment of aliens.

Personality

A tranquil scholar and an imperturbable teacher, perhaps too calm and placid, he exacted a high standard of proficiency from his students, who respected him for his learning and loved him for his character. Courageous and happy in disposition, stanch and unyielding in principle, unworldly in viewpoint, he was an idealist as a writer, a teacher, and a man. He was modest to the extreme, although possessed of a marked yet unconscious dignity. Devoted to the University, Minor labored actively for its advancement but steadfastly opposed co-education, co"rdination, and the general tendency to make it a standardized state university. The institution, indeed, was almost a part of him; there he was born and educated, there as childhood playmates he and his wife first met, there he spent his happy married life, there distinction came to him, there he died and is buried.

Connections

In 1897, Minor married Natalie Embra Venable, a daughter of Charles Scott Venable, a colonel in the Confederate army and professor of mathematics in the University of Virginia; two children were born to them.

Father:

John Barbee Minor

Mother:

Anne Jacqueline Fisher (Colston)

Wife:

Natalie Embra Venable