Chief Justice Joseph Branch Inn of Court

The Forsyth County Inn was named after North Carolina's 21st Chief Justice Joseph Branch. The year before Dean Emeritus Robert Walsh came to North Carolina he first became involved in the American Inns of Court movement in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1988. When Dean Walsh came to North Carolina to be dean at Wake Forest in 1989, there were no chapters of the American Inns of Court in the state. Dean Walsh immediately went to work with five great Wake Forest lawyers (Judge Carlton Tilley, Grady Barnhill, Bill Davis, Dan Fouts, and Fred Crumpler) to establish a chapter at the Wake Forest School of Law. The Chief Justice Joseph Branch Inn of Court began operation the next year, 1990, the same year that the Chief Justice William H. Bobbitt Inn of Court began operation in Charlotte. The Branch and Bobbitt Inns were the first Inns in North Carolina. The Branch Inn was Inn number 117 and the first associated with a law school in the state. The Branch Inn of Court is one of the few Inns of about 400 in the country that is housed in a law school and has more than triple the student membership of any other Inn in the country.