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Aubrey E. Strode (1861-1969,88 cubic feet) was a Virginia lawyer, state senator and eugenics advocate who drafted the Virginia sterilization law and brought Buck vs. Bell to the Supreme Court. This collection consists of his personal and professional papers concerning his family, law practice, army service, political and legislative activities as a member of the Virginia Senate, the Virginia Democratic Party and the Progressive movement, and as a co-owner of the newspaper, The Amherst Progress. The bulk of the papers consists of the files of the law firms of Strode and Tucker and Strode and Edwards, containing correspondence, court records, trial transcripts, exhibits, estate settlements, debt collections, and various legal documents.

The Duke law firm papers include correspondence, case files, legal, insuarance, and financial records, as well as ledgers. The files provide extensive documentation of a small-town family practice. Since the insurance business and the Dukes's family business affairs were handled in the same office as the law practice, these files had remained with the legal files. The family correspondence found with these papers was transferred to Special Collections in Alderman Library.

This collection contains 10 volumes (numbered I-VII and IX-XI) of briefs for cases in which R. Randolph Hicks participated. Two of the volumes pertain to the Stein, et al v. Morris, et al suit, related the Morris Plan banks. David Stein, a former client of Arthur J. Morris, sued him arguing that he had stolen the idea from him, but the court found against him. (Gunnar Trumbull, Consumer Lending in France and America. Credit and Welfare, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

The practice of Long and Sadler, as documented in this collection, was characteristic of legal work in a small town in the early twentieth century. The cases are virtually all civil, primarily trusts and estates, real estate, insurance, torts, and divorce. From the earliest period of Long's practice, there are very few documents: one case file, two bound abstracts of title, and a ledger book dating from the early 1900s. After 1914, Long's time was apparently taken up primarily by his duties as Commissioner of Accounts, although he also served as attorney in trust and estate cases, and handled some divorces. The bulk of the cases documented here, therefore, are Sadler's.