1825 Civil Code Bicentennial – Politics and the Making of the Civil Code – Friday, April 11, 2025

On April 11 at Metairie Park Country Day School, Professor Warren M. Billings delivered a lecture about the making of the 1825 Louisiana Civil Code as an act of politics, examining its political evolution to 1860, the eve of the Civil War. Warren M. Billings, Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of New Orleans, is a student of colonial Virginia and Louisiana law. He graduated A.B. from the College of William & Mary, A.M. from the University of Pittsburgh, and Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. Widely published, his books include The Historic Rules of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, 1813–1879 (Lafayette, La., 1985), In Search of Fundamental Order: Louisiana’s Constitutions, 1813–1974 [ed, with Edward F. Haas] (Lafayette, La., 1993), A Law Unto Itself?: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History [ed. with Mark F. Fernandez] (Baton Rouge, La., 2001) Magistrates and Pioneers: Essays in the History of American Law (Clark, New Jersey, 2011), The Supreme Court of Louisiana: A Bicentennial Sketch (New Orleans, 2013), and A Bayou Bar: The Louisiana State Bar Association, 1803–1941 (in production at the University of New Press to be published in 2024). He sat on the federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission and the Board of Directors of the Louisiana State Museum. A past fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a former Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellow, he holds honorary life membership in the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians and the Company of Fellows of the Louisiana Historical Association. The Louisiana Historical Association presented him its Garnie W. McGinty Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. By order of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, he was designated Bicentennial Court Historian in March 2013.