William L. Hammersmith

William L. Hammersmith was a longtime member of the Nevada legal community who practiced law in Reno, having been admitted to the State Bar of Nevada on December 31, 1949. His career spanned the decades in which Reno and the surrounding Washoe County grew into a center of legal and civic life in northern Nevada.

Mr. Hammersmith's practice carried him before the highest court in the state. In State v. Second Judicial District Court, Washoe County, decided by the Supreme Court of Nevada in 1959, he appeared as counsel for the respondent in a land condemnation matter in which the State had appealed an award of compensation it contended was excessive. His work in that appeal reflects the kind of substantive civil litigation that marked his years at the Reno bar.

Mr. Hammersmith died in 1995, and his passing was noted in the Reno Gazette-Journal on October 30 of that year. He is remembered as an attorney who devoted his professional life to the practice of law in Reno and to service before the courts of Nevada.