UVA LAW SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
❱ This undated photo of the Law Library in Clark Hall demonstrates what the male-dominated law school environment was like circa 1950.
Swanson, who won his lawsuit on Sept. 5, 1950, to become the first black student admitted to UVA. Ruth vowed on her survey to be among those who created a welcoming environment. AFTER RUTH FINISHED her time at the Law School, stopping short of obtaining her LL.M., Elizabeth returned to UVA in the fall of 1952. She landed a spot on the Virginia Law Review, becoming among the handful of women who had joined its ranks since the journal was first published, almost 40 years earlier. “Miss Taliaferro is now the only girl on the Review and steps into the vacancy left by Miss. Margaret E. [Seiler] Gordon,” the Law Weekly reported that November. But Elizabeth wasn’t filling a token spot. She earned the position, and against some pushback, according to her son Ted. By writing onto the journal, she also got to know her future husband, Samuel N. Allen Jr. ’53, the Law Review’s Virginia editor. “During her public defense of her paper, my father needled her pretty good—to the point where my mother interrupted and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Do you think you’re a little tin god?’ And my father said, ‘Actually, I do. [But] I think we [the Law Review board] should put it to a vote.’ So they put it to a vote, and they all agreed they were little tin gods. “But what my mother didn’t know for many years was there was another member of the Law Review who was going to
blackball my mom simply because she was a woman. And my dad, in the background, said, ‘Here’s the deal: You’re going to let that woman on, or I’m going to blackball every single other candidate, because she’s clearly written the best paper. And either we’re going to be intellectually honest, or we’re not.’ And she didn’t know for years that my dad had actually been the one to defend her.” Elizabeth thrived on the review and graduated fourth in her class in 1953. The next year, she married Sam, her champion. The ceremony was held in Richmond at the Thomas Jefferson Hotel (famous then for its marble pools containing live alligators). “That day, she told Sam she wanted to have four boys, all exactly like Sam,” her obituary reads. Her prediction of four sons would indeed come true. ELIZABETH—NOW ELIZABETH ALLEN—worked in the latter half of the 1950s for the blue-chip Wall Street firm Lord, Day & Lord. She represented such clients as the Cunard Steamboat Line (which operated the famous Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth), The New York Times and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Herbert Brownell Jr., who had been attorney general under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, served as her mentor at the firm. But the couple found the pace of life in New York incompatible with how they wished to raise their children. The growing family relocated to Haddam, Connecticut, in the early 1960s. FALL 2019 UVA LAWYER 61