William Waller Hening (1768–1828) was a 19th-century attorney, legal scholar, publisher and politician during the formative years of the United States.
[1] He was a contemporary of many founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and James Monroe.
[3][4] He may have been named for his maternal great-great grandfather William Waller (1630-1690), who emigrated from Gregories in Buckinghamshire to Gloucester County in the Virginia Colony where he married Mary Allen and had at least three sons) or great-grandfather William Waller (1673-1703), who was born in Stafford County and distributed slaves in his will.
[4] This boy had a brother or cousin named Robert Hening, who was an attorney and commissioner of accounts in Stafford County.
Hening lived in Charlottesville (the Albemarle County seat) on University Street from 1793 until 1805, during which time he began what became a short political career.
[7] However, with access to Jefferson's library, Hening continued restorating county records that had been destroyed by the British during the Revolutionary War.
Hening won re-election to that part-time legislative position, but was disqualified because he had been appointed to Virginia's Executive Council.
[14][15][8] His published statutory codifications are routinely cited by historians and genealogists, even if many individual laws were superseded after the American Civil War, as well as later industrialization.
The well researched 13 volume magnum opus of legal scholarship that codified the Commonwealth of Virginia's laws from 1619–1792, along with an extensive appendix which describes trials and historical events.
[20] Other popular text writers of the era were Everard Hall, Joseph Tate, John Robinson and Thomas Cooper (whom Jefferson had selected as the first law professor of the University of Virginia).
[20] Perhaps the closest compariton is to Blackstone (1803), with notes and appendices by future federal judge and law professor St. George Tucker of Williamsburg published Between 1808 and 1811 Hening also published four volumes of court reports in collaboration with William Munford (including the first advance sheet system in Virginia).
Hening continued his grandfather's tradition in part by becoming the reporter for the New Hampshire Supreme Court, legal textbook author and professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania.