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Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Cornelia Clark delivers Florrie Sanders Wilkes Lecture

Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Cornelia Clark will deliver the Florrie Sanders Wilkes Lecture, focusing on women on the appellate bench.

Justice Clark earned her J.D. at Vanderbilt in 1979 after earning a B.A. at Vanderbilt in 1971 and a Master's degree at Harvard University in 1972. She was in private practice with Farris Warfield & Kanaday before being appointed Circuit Judge for Tennessee's 21st Judicial District in 1989. She served as a circuit court judge until 1999, when she became director of the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts. She was appointed to Tennessee's Supreme Court in 2005.

In addition to serving on Vanderbilt's adjunct law faculty, she has been a faculty member of the American Academy of Judicial Education and of the National Judicial College. She is a member of the American, Tennessee, Nashville, and Williamson County Bar Associations, the American Judicature Society, the Tennessee Lawyers' Association for Women, and the Lawyers Association for Women, Marion Griffin Chapter. She is a past board chair of the Tennessee Bar Foundation.

The Florrie Wilkes Sanders Lectureship was established by the family of Sylvia Sanders Kelly, a 1954 Vanderbilt graduate, and honors the contributions of Ms. Kelly’s great-grandfather and Florrie Wilkes Sanders’ grandfather, John Summerfield Wilkes, to his community and to the legal profession. Florrie Wilkes Sanders was a 1925 Vanderbilt graduate. Her grandfather, John Summerfield Wilkes, was a lawyer and a Tennessee Supreme Court judge, a position to which he was nominated because of a case in which he defended the right of women to own property in Tennessee. He accepted the post in 1892 and was reelected in 1902, ultimately serving on the court for 16 years.