He then attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia and won election to the Order of the Coif before graduating with an LL.B.
During World War II, Accomack County voters elected Ames commonwealth attorney (prosecutor), and he served from 1943 until 1955.
The President of the Virginia Senate appointed the newly elected Ames and fellow former Commonwealth Attorney Earl A. Fitzpatrick of Roanoke (who became Vice-Chairman of the new Committee on Offenses against the Administration of Justice); the Speaker of the House of Delegates appointed veteran delegate and attorney John B. Boatwright to chair the Committee, with newcomer William F. Stone (later elected to the state Senate) and veteran J. J. Williams Jr. as the remaining members.
In March, the Boatwright Committee formerly opined that various segregationist organizations did not commit the newly expanded legal offenses of champerty, maintenance, barratry, running and capping, nor the unauthorized practice of law.
[5][6][7][8] Meanwhile, on January 19, 1959, both a three-judge federal panel and the Virginia Supreme Court declared the Stanley Plan unconstitutional.
[9] Redistricting after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Davis v. Mann meant the First Senatorial District encompassed conservative Accomack and Northampton Counties on the Eastern Shore, as well as Mathews, Gloucester and York Counties on the peninsula (which included liberal Williamsburg with its College of William and Mary).
[10] Although Byrd Democrats greatly resented Fears' election over Ames (and Stone approached him in the Senate chamber to tell him so), and Fears had opponents in both the primary and general elections in 1971, he was re-elected and served two decades in the state Senate, until defeated in 1991 by Republican Tommy Norment of Virginia Beach.