George Wythe signed the Declaration of Independence, trained Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay, and became the first law professor in the United States at the College of William and Mary. This episode traces his path from a wealthy Virginia plantation heir to the colony’s famously honest lawyer who demanded accountability in the John Robinson treasury scandal and the John Chiswell bail controversy.

We explore his groundbreaking rulings, from Commonwealth v. Caton, which laid early groundwork for judicial review, to Hudgins v. Wright, where he tried to make freedom the legal default for every Virginian. Then the story turns dark: in 1806 his grandnephew George Wythe Sweeney laced the household coffee with arsenic, and the one eyewitness, Lydia Broadnax, was barred from testifying because she was Black.

• How Wythe replaced legal apprenticeships with lectures, mock trials, and legislative simulations
• Why the Virginia Declaration of Rights became his tool to challenge slavery, and how former student Spencer Roane helped overturn it
• The arsenic poisoning that killed Wythe and young Michael Brown, and the codicil he wrote to disinherit his killer
• How a law silencing Black witnesses and a forgery technicality let Sweeney walk free
• How Wythe’s library, left to Jefferson, became part of the seed of the Library of Congress