Wilkinson, Walker win covet Thomas Jefferson Medals

By Derry Wade and Michael Marshall

J . Harvie Wilkinson III, the former Chief Judge of the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and landscape architect Peter Walker, principal of Peter Walker and Partners and newly selected winner of the design competition for the World Trade Center memorial, have been chosen to receive the annual Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals in Law and Architecture, respectively.

The medals, sponsored jointly by the University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, are the highest outside honors given by U.Va. They will be presented to Wilkinson and Walker on April 13 as part of Founder’s Day activities here.

“These medals emphasize the vitality of the Jeffersonian ideals of creativity and leadership in today’s world, and it is a privilege to join with the University in honoring individuals whose accomplishments have had a significant impact on our culture as well as our legacy for future generations,” said Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

J. Harvie Wilkinson III

Often discussed as a potential U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Wilkinson earned his J.D. from the U.Va. School of Law in 1972 and then served as clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Wilkinson has returned to the Law School to teach four times. He served as editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot from 1978-81 and as deputy assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in 1983-84. He was on the University’s Board of Visitors from 1970 to 1973. He is the author of “Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics” (1968); “From Brown to Bakke, The Supreme Court and School Integration” (1979), and “One Nation Indivisible, How Ethnic Separatism Threatens America” (1997).

Wilkinson is known for conservative rulings. In a speech to the Law School last spring titled “Why Conservative Jurisprudence is Compassionate,” he argued that the nation’s courts have a higher duty to maintain rational and impartial standards of judgment that preserve public trust in the judiciary than in finding remedies for social problems, a task properly left to legislatures. Conservative judges are faulted as too strict about adhering to rules or caring more about hypothetical future issues than immediate injuries to claimants, he said, but emotional decisions lead to disparate outcomes that end up undermining public confidence in the justice system.

“Reason, cold calculating unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials of our future support and defense,” Wilkinson said, borrowing Abraham Lincoln’s words.

Peter Walker

A founding partner of the architectural firm Sasaki, Walker and Associates, Peter Walker later opened the firm’s successful West Coast office, The S.W.A. Group. His current practice, Peter Walker and Partners, focuses on parks and corporate and educational campuses, here and abroad. Recent projects include the Millennium Park for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia; the Sony Center in Berlin, Germany; the San Diego Library Walk in California; and Sky Forest Plaza in Tokyo, Japan.

Walker, a graduate of the landscape architecture program at the University of Illinois and of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has chaired departments of landscape architecture at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley. His founding of Spacemaker Press, including the LandFORUM series, raised the visibility of landscape architecture and provided a scholarly forum for project analysis.

He is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a recipient of the Institute Honor from the American Institute of Architects, a fellow of the Institute of Urban Design and the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Institute in Rome, among other honors.

Both recipients are expected to make public remarks during their visit here in April. An exhibition of Walker’s work also will be on display at the School of Architecture, April 5-24, weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.