Leaders Learn Here: Roger Page, Tennessee Supreme Court Justice

When Supreme Court Justice Roger Page was growing up on the family farm outside Henderson, Tennessee, he couldn’t have guessed he’d become a lawyer — or a judge.

“My parents didn’t go to college, there were no lawyers in my family,” Page said.

He would pave his own educational path, and after attending the University of Tennessee at Martin, Page went on to pharmacy school at the UT Health Science Center in Memphis where he began learning about pharmacy law.

“As soon as I started reading the cases and talking about law with the professor, I knew what I wanted to do,” he said.

Page soon ended up at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law on a full Herff scholarship and never looked back.

“Lawyers who graduate from Memphis can compete with anybody,” Page said. “My classmates were all great people, fun to be around and we had very good professors, too.”

After law school, Page clerked for then-U.S. District Court Judge Julia Gibbons and practiced law in Atlanta and Jackson, Tennessee; his family has lived in West Tennessee for at least seven generations. He began his judicial career as an elected Circuit Court Judge in 1998 and went on to a seat on the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals.

Page became a Tennessee Supreme Court Justice in 2016 and served as Chief Justice from 2021-2023. He will retire from the bench in August 2024.

How did going to the UofM Law School impact his career? Without it, “I wouldn’t have ended up on the Supreme Court, that’s for sure. We got a practical education, and for decades, UofM students had the highest scores on the state bar exam. We had some good students and were prepared for it with excellent curriculum and professors.”

He is excited about former Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland becoming the law school dean. “It will be good for the school,” he said.