Bozman '12 Receives I'Anson Award
Honors I'Anson Award recipient Jeffrey T. Bozman '12, center, and Stacey-Rae Simcox, Managing Attorney of the Veterans Benefits Clinic, and Dean Davison M. Douglas. Photo by Colonial Photography
Jeffrey T. Bozman '12 received the I'Anson Award, the highest award given to a graduating student by the Law School's faculty, during the Law School's graduation ceremony on May 13. In his remarks Dean Davison M. Douglas told the audience that the award is given to "a member of the graduating class who shows strong evidence of great professional promise through scholarship, character, and leadership." The award is named in honor of Lawrence W. I'Anson (1907-1990), a graduate of the College of William & Mary and a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia.
Douglas noted that Bozman served a tour in Iraq as an officer in the Marine Corps after earning his undergraduate degree from Princeton University. At William & Mary, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and was inducted into Order of the Coif, the highest academic honor that can be achieved by law students.
"Jeff is an extraordinary leader - smart, humble, easy with praise for his peers, responsible," the dean said. One faculty member described Bozman, said Douglas, "as the most gifted and talented law student she had ever worked with." He quoted another professor who described him as "first amongst his peers in everything from his ability to grasp legal concepts to his ability to lead his fellow students in their work on the Law Review. He embodies the citizen-lawyer ideal of Thomas Jefferson. His character is without reproach."
Earlier on May 13, Bozman received William & Mary's Thatcher Prize during the College's commencement ceremony. Click here for story. The prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding accomplishment in graduate or professional school study and is named in honor of William & Mary's 21st Chancellor, Margaret the Lady Thatcher. Bozman is the third law school graduate to receive the award. Mary Sue Backus '01 and Cullen Ann Drescher '09 previously received the honor.
Bozman will begin a clerkship later this year with the Honorable Rebecca Beach Smith '71, J.D. '79, the federal judge for the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia.