Grundy is the seat of Buchanan County, the only county in Virginia that borders both West Virginia and Kentucky - tucked into a fold of the Appalachian Plateau where the Levisa Fork cuts through the sandstone. By the early 1990s, the coal economy was contracting, the town's population was shrinking, and local leaders were looking for something that could anchor a future. The notion of a law school in a remote coal town was, by any conventional measure, implausible. But the area had no lawyers to spare and a county economy desperate for institutional investment. A million-dollar loan, eventually converted to a grant, paid for renovating the former Grundy Junior High School. The State Council of Higher Education in Virginia approved the school to enroll Juris Doctor students in 1997. The American Bar Association came along with provisional accreditation soon after.

ASL was created to train lawyers for places like the place it was built in. The curriculum emphasizes alternative dispute resolution and community service - both topics chosen with central Appalachia in mind, where civil disputes often involve neighbors and where access to formal legal services has historically been thin. Every student is required to perform community service hours. The school's small size - around 128 full-time students - was deliberate, allowing close mentorship from a faculty that included nationally recognized scholars who had chosen Grundy for the same reasons the school existed. The dean at the time of opening, and through the school's first formative years, was Anthony Sutin, who had served in the Clinton Justice Department before coming to Buchanan County to build something new.

On January 16, 2002, a former student named Peter Odighizuwa, who had been dismissed for academic reasons, returned to campus with a handgun. He killed Dean Anthony Sutin, Professor Thomas Blackwell, and first-year student Angela Dales, a single mother working her way through law school. Three other students were wounded. The shooting lasted minutes. Odighizuwa was subdued in the parking lot by other students and held until police arrived. He was eventually found mentally competent, pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and is serving multiple life sentences at Red Onion State Prison. The school responded by planting memorial trees on its front lawn, renaming its student services office and scholarship program in Angela Dales's memory, and continuing the work. It has never closed in remembrance, but it has never forgotten.

ASL's modest early success encouraged the same Buchanan County leaders to try the same trick again. The Appalachian College of Pharmacy - originally the University of Appalachia College of Pharmacy - was founded in nearby Oakwood in 2003, opening its doors in 2005. It occupies the buildings of the former Garden High School. Like the law school, it was designed to serve a region with chronic shortages of professional services and to give graduates a pathway into Appalachian communities that needed them. The two institutions, tucked into a corner of the country that most maps show only as elevation, train a steady stream of lawyers and pharmacists who go to work in towns that used to lose their best students permanently to the cities.

Like many small private law schools, ASL has faced hard years. Bar passage rates have wavered. Employment outcomes for graduates, particularly in the years following the 2008 recession, were difficult - the school's 2021 disclosure showed 31% of the Class of 2020 in full-time, JD-required work within nine months. The ABA placed accreditation pressure on the school in 2017, which was later lifted in 2020. The school has continued to operate, continued to graduate classes, continued to plant graduates into the courthouses and law offices of central Appalachia. The motto on the seal still reads Ex petra veritatis justitia exsurgit. The faculty fellowships still bear the names of Sutin and Blackwell. The road outside campus still bears the name of Angela Dales. From the rock of truth - and from the rock of remembered loss - the school continues to do what it was built to do.