Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice William M. Barker will deliver The Webb School commencement address at 1:30 p.m. May 26 at the historic campus in Bell Buckle.
“My brother attended Webb School and I have many fond memories of visiting him while he was a student there,” the chief justice said. “I certainly could not have imagined then that I would someday have the honor of being the graduation speaker at Webb.”
Barker, of Chattanooga, was appointed in 1998 to the Tennessee Supreme and was elected the same year to an eight-year term. He began his judicial career in 1983 as a Circuit Court judge in Hamilton County. In 1995, he was appointed to the state Court of Criminal Appeals where he served until he joined the five-member Tennessee Supreme Court. He was elected chief justice by his colleagues on the court in October 2005.
From 1984 until 2002, Justice Barker also served as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In 2000, he was named Outstanding Adjunct Professor by the Student Government Association.
Barker was chosen to receive the 2006 Distinguished Alumni Awards at both the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and University of Cincinnati School of Law. The chief justice received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 1964 and earned his law degree from the University Of Cincinnati School Of Law in 1967.
He is a frequent lecturer at legal seminars on the subject of ethics. Barker and his wife Catherine, a teacher, traveled to Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 2005 where they had been invited to lecture at several schools, including two Slovakian law schools. He taught prospective lawyers in the former communist nations about the United States and Tennessee legal systems.
Founded in 1870 by noted scholar William R. "Old Sawney" Webb, The Webb School is the South's oldest continuously operating boarding school. The graduating class includes 46 boarding and day students from five states and four other countries. They will be attending colleges and universities across the country, including Yale, Sewanee and Mount Holyoke.