Discovery Winter 2026 % Volume 12, No. 1
the newsletter from washington and lee university school of law
IN TRIBUTE:
Murch Exits the Stage Professor Brian Murchison will retire from full-time teaching at the end of the academic year. BY JEFF HANNA
A
s a two-hour Torts class wrapped up one morning last fall, a student approached a visitor who had been sitting quietly in the back row of Lewis Hall’s Classroom A. “What did you think of the class?” she asked. The visitor said he’d been struck by the lively Socratic exchanges between students and the professor as they debated the rescue doctrine and implied assumption of risk. “Well,” she replied, “that’s Professor Murch. He’s a legend.” After 43 years, the legend will retire at the end of the academic year. To say that Brian Murchison, the Charles S. Rowe Professor of Law, will be missed is to understate the impact of a career that has shaped generations of W&L law students. In addition to his teaching and scholarship on administrative law, mass media law, jurisprudence, and torts, he has served as interim dean, director of the Frances Lewis Law Center, and co-founder of the Black Lung Clinic, to name only a few high-profile activities. But Murchison’s influence has reached beyond the walls of Lewis Hall. He has touched virtually every corner of the university — from teaching undergraduate courses to serving on presidential search committees, from chairing the Commission on Institutional History and Community to directing the Mudd Center for Ethics. In short, he has been a defining presence at W&L. When Murchison, his wife Ann, and their 2-yearold daughter rolled into Lexington in the summer of 1982, he wasn’t thinking about a four-decade career. Mostly, he wondered how he and his young family would adjust after leaving Washington, D.C., where he’d grown up and was working at a law firm. At Hamel, Park, McCabe & Sanders, he was on the fast track, practicing administrative law and especially enjoying work for broadcasters — “hapless broadcasters,” as he calls them — and
Students gather outside Murchison’s office for one of his many hallway exam review sessions. suggested I consider it,” he said. Despite his reservations, Murchison sent a letter of application to Rick Kirgis, then chair of the appointments committee. Kirgis, who later served as dean from 1983 to 1988, replied that the hiring season had ended. “I thought it was his polite way of confirming that I wasn’t qualified,” said Murchison. When hiring season began again the following year, Murchison’s phone rang. It was Kirgis, telling him it was now time to apply. Murchison remained skeptical. He assumed W&L was simply expanding its pool and that Kirgis, a Yale grad, was extending a courtesy call to a fellow Yalie. But he applied, received an offer, and faced a decision.
To say that Brian Murchison, the Charles S. Rowe Professor of Law, will be missed is to understate the impact of a career that has shaped generations of W&L law students. other media clients who tangled with the Federal Communications Commission. Then a “fluky thing,” as he puts it, occurred. One of his sister’s friends told him about a faculty opening at Washington and Lee’s law school and suggested he apply. He was hesitant. “One, I liked what I was doing. And two, I didn’t think I was qualified to be a law professor,” Murchison said. “I did not clerk for a federal judge, and my impression was that was a prerequisite for getting a teaching job.” He did, however, have teaching experience. Between graduating from Yale University and his enrollment in Yale Law School, he spent three years in the Peace Corps teaching English in Benin, West Africa. “Maybe that’s why my sister’s friend
He could envision staying at the law firm and continuing to work in mass media law, which he loved. He’d also had fleeting thoughts of a journalism career. He was an editor of the Yale Daily News as an undergrad and had worked one summer during law school as a Metro reporter at the defunct Washington Star. “After my second year of law school when you’re supposed to be finding a permanent job in a law firm, I was somewhat disillusioned and applied to the Star,” Murchison said. He earned several front-page bylines, even scooping the rest of the media on the disappearance of a 12-year-old boy from his home in Vienna, Virginia. Although his reporting impressed the Star editors, they discouraged him from switching paths.
Quite the opposite, in fact. “They said, ‘Are you crazy? We don’t make any money. You’ve got to go back to law school,’” Murchison said. He took their advice, returned to Yale for his final year, and was settled in as associate at the law firm when Kirgis called. This time he took a chance and accepted the offer. Murchison said his transition to life as a law school professor was relatively smooth because W&L fit him so well. “I seemed to be happily in sync,” he said. “When I came here the ethos was small and personalized, and there was equality among the professors. It was the luckiest thing that could possibly have happened to me.” In his first week, senior faculty member Lewis (Lash) Larue appeared in his doorway carrying a massive book manuscript. “It was about this thick,” Murchison said, spreading his hands a foot apart. “’Could you read this over the weekend and give me some helpful notes?’ Lash asked. I remember saying to Ann, I’m used to hierarchy in the law. This brilliant man just asked me to read his manuscript and comment on it. I thought, ‘How wonderful is that?’ It shows that this is an incredible place.” He praised the mentoring he received from faculty colleagues like Larue, Roger Groot, Joe Ulrich, and Uncus McThenia. “These men were a generation older than I was and were great to me,” he said. The students welcomed him as well, nicknamed him Murch, and responded to his teaching style, which included Shakespeare. An English major at Yale, Murchison begins his Administrative Law class with Hamlet. “I tell the class that the poor prince is analogous to a baffled government agency buffeted
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