Dudley honored with Sullivan Award

Staff Report

Earl C. Dudley Jr. was honored at Saturday’s Valedictory Exercises as the faculty winner of this year’s Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award.

Dudley, a 1967 graduate of the U.Va. School of Law, has been a full-time faculty member since 1989 and served as associate general counsel of the University for five years.

Dudley has worked closely with the Honor Committee for the past six years, at a time when demands on the student members were high and trust of faculty and administrators was low. He was able to bring students and administrators together and create a model for a productive relationship, said Patricia M. Lampkin, interim vice president for student affairs.

“A brilliant attorney and a sensitive human being, Dudley speaks his mind, is not afraid to propose an unpopular view and does it in a way that causes all to think and address the issue but keep their individual dignity in disagreeing with one another,” Lampkin said.

Dudley has contributed his legal expertise and many extra hours in other important service to the University community, Lampkin noted in her recommendation for the award.

Before returning to the University full-time, he was a partner in a Washington law firm and taught trial advocacy seminars at the Law School. He also spent two years as general counsel for the Committee on the Judiciary in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is an expert on evidence, civil and criminal procedure, and constitutional law.

As a U.Va. law student, Dudley was editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review. After graduation, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justices Stanley Reed and Earl Warren. He serves on the Virginia State Bar Committee on Professionalism and was a member of the boards of directors of the Stuart Stiller Memorial Foundation, the Disability Rights Center and the Center for the Study of Psychiatry. He was a public member of the ethics committee of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and he has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, as well as a faculty member of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy in programs in various cities.