Warren M. Billings

Warren M. Billings, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of New Orleans and Visiting Professor at the College of William & Mary Law School, is a student of colonial Virginia and Louisiana law.

Widely published, his most recent books include 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), A Unexpected Collector: The Making of An Historian’ Law Library (Austin, Texas, 2013), and “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe” and Early Virginia Legal Culture (Charlottesville, 2017). His shorter works have appeared in popular magazines and scholarly serials such as Virginia Cavalcade, Law Library Journal, Louisiana History, the Michigan Law Review, the Journal of Southern History, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and the William and Mary Quarterly.

He chaired Preservation Virginia’s Jamestown Rediscovery Archaeological Advisory Board, and was a member of Preservation Virginia’s Board of Trustees. He sat on the federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission, the Board of Directors of the Louisiana State Museum, and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. In 2002, he was Visiting Williams Professor of Law at the University of Richmond. 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, and the Virginia Historical Society conferred its Richard Slattern Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography upon him in 2005. By order of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, he was designated Bicentennial Court Historian in March 2013.