Warren M. Billings, Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of New Orleans is a student of colonial Virginia and Louisiana law. Widely published, his most recent books include A Law Unto Itself?: Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History (Baton Rouge, 2001), A Little Parliament The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, 2004), Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia (Baton Rouge, 2004) The Papers of Sir William Berkeley, 1605-1677 (Richmond, 2007), The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1600-1700, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, 2007), and Magistrates and Pioneers: Essays in the History of American Law (Clark, New Jersey, 2011). His shorter works have appeared in popular magazines and such scholarly serials as Virginia Cavalcade, Louisiana History, the Michigan Law Review, the Journal of Southern History, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, and Law Library Journal.
He chaired Preservation Virginia's Jamestown Rediscovery Advisory Board from 1994 to 2008, was a member of Preservation Virginia's Board of Trustees from 2002 to 2008 (re-appointed in 2011), sat on the federal Jamestown 400th Commemoration Commission from 2003 to 2008, the Board of Directors of the Louisiana State Museum from 1989 to 2004, and was Historian of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, 1982-2005. In 2002, he was Visiting Williams Professor of Law at the University of Richmond. A past fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a former Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellow, he holds honorary life membership in the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians and the Company of Fellows of the Louisiana Historical Association.
The Louisiana Historical Association presented him its Garnie W. McGinty Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, and the Virginia Historical Society conferred its Richard Slattern Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography upon him in 2005. Currently, he is Visiting Professor of Law at the College of William and Mary School of Law.
