Considering herself a friend of the University, Elizabeth “Ibby” Greer, widow of T. Keister Greer, a University alumnus and lawyer, will be donating her husband’s personal legal files to the Corcoran Department of History later this year in hopes of giving back to the University that she believes gave her husband so much.
“It was his Virginia education that made his career,” Ibby Greer said, noting that her husband’s education gave him the ability to spot technicalities that others could not. “He was, so to say, a lawyer’s lawyer.”
A 1948 Law School alumnus, T. Keister Greer was known for his legal career in both Virginia and California. Ibby Greer said his cases — which include U.S. Supreme Court case Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Water District (1973) — are the basis of the files.
Explaining her donation to the department, Greer said she hopes to fulfill research needs for both students and faculty and showcase how T. Keister Greer applied his University education.
History Prof. Charles McCurdy said the files will be valuable to the department.
“Both undergraduate and graduate students will find these files to be of great resource when conducting research,” he said. “Keister’s life was just that interesting.”
Ibby Greer said she chose the Corcoran Department of History as the recipient of these files because she believes the education her husband received there contributed greatly to his later success.
“My husband’s attachment, passion and respect for its faculty make this department very special to me,” Greer said. “He used his education in his daily work. It enabled him to crack the cases he did.”
McCurdy echoed Ibby Greer’s praise of her husband, noting the skills the former lawyer exhibited in the courtroom.
“He could work a jury and a room as well as anyone I know,” McCurdy said. “He was persuasive and sharp, yet never hostile.”
Although this recent donation represents Greer’s support and gratitude toward the department, she has been, as McCurdy stated, “one of the great boosters of the University” for many years. In the 1990s she founded the T. Keister Greer Faculty Endowment Fund to aid faculty members in their desires to conduct research overseas, in honor of her husband.
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