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Judge Waugh Crigler '70 Announces Retirement

A 1970 graduate of Washington and Lee who has enjoyed a long career as a judge has announced his retirement from the bench. The Hon. B. Waugh Crigler has been the U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Western District of Virginia since 1981. He will step down at the expiration of his current term, Sept. 30, 2013.

Waugh, who grew up in Culpeper, Va., earned a B.A. in history from W&L and obtained his J.D. in 1973 from the University of Tennessee College of Law.

“I certainly will miss , but there are other things I need to turn my attention to after 40 years as a lawyer and as a law student,” Waugh told the Charlottesville Daily Progress in a story about his retirement. You can read that article here.

As a new lawyer, Waugh clerked for the Hon. Robert Love Taylor in the Eastern District of Tennessee. Back home in Culpeper, he practiced law with Davies, Crigler, Barrell and Will, P.C. He handled state and federal civil and criminal litigation and was licensed to practice in Tennessee, Virginia and the District of Columbia. He also was admitted in the U.S. District Courts for Eastern and Western Virginia, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Taylor moved Waugh’s admission to the U.S. Supreme Court; it is a rare occasion when an active U.S. District Judge appears before the Supreme Court.

As a judge, Waugh served mostly in the Harrisonburg and Charlottesville divisions of the court. According to a press release about his retirement, “some of his most memorable civil cases have involved landfill, water supply and trash disposal disputes in both Charlottesville other communities in the Western District, the anti-trust action between the Daily Progress and the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors, and the bitter dispute over customers between the area’s two early cable television providers.”

“Every case that comes into court is about a broken relationship,” Waugh said in the Daily Progress interview.

He spent six years on the Judicial Conference of the United States Criminal Rules Advisory Committee and belonged to the Virginia State Bar Litigation Board of Governors and the VSB Professionalism Committee. He was vice-chair of the Virginia State Bar Board of Governors for the Education of Lawyers, the founding chair of the Law School Professionalism Committee and a member of the Virginia Bar Association Professionalism Commission.

Waugh has also taught for more than 25 years as an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and at professionalism and continuing legal education programs throughout Virginia.

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