John Tayloe Lomax

John Tayloe Lomax (January 1781 – 10 October 1862) was an American jurist.

Lomax was born in Port Tobago, Caroline County, Virginia. He graduated at St. John's College, Annapolis in 1797, studied law, and began practice at Port Royal, Virginia. He moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1805, and in 1809 to Menokin, where he remained nine years.

In 1818, he returned to Fredericksburg and in 1826 was appointed professor of the school of law in the University of Virginia. He resigned that office in 1830 to accept a seat on the bench of the general court of the state as Associate Justice, to which he was unanimously elected by the legislature. Under the Constitution of 1851 he was again chosen for a term of eight years by vote of the people of the circuit. The convention that framed this constitution had adopted a clause disqualifying any person over seventy years of age from holding the office of judge; but at the request of members of the bar this provision was cancelled so as not to exclude Lomax.

He continued on the bench until 1857, when he retired to private life. He received the degree of LL. D. from Harvard in 1847. He died in Fredericksburg in 1862.

He is the author of a Digest of the Laws respecting Real Property generally Adopted and in Use in the United States (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1839; 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, Richmond, 1856) and a Treatise on the Law of Executors and Administrators generally in Use in the United States (2 vols., 1841 ; 2nd ed., Richmond, 1856).

Sources[]

• Appletons' Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. IV (copyright expired)
• Mathew Fontaine Maury The Pathfinder of the Seas by Charles Lee Lewis, United States Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 1927, ref p. 41 (1841)