Edward Sanford received two bachelor’s degrees when he graduated from the university in 1883 (the AB and the PhB). Active in student life at the university, he became business manager of the Chi Delta Crescent in January 1882, succeeding Milton Ochs, who became editor in chief. He received, additionally, the AB (1885), MA, and LLB (1889) degrees from Harvard, where he was one of the first editors of the Harvard Law Review, which was established while he was a student. In 1908 the University of Cincinnati awarded him an LLD degree.
In 1890 Sanford opened a law office in Knoxville. In 1894 he was selected as the alumni and university orator to deliver the University of Tennessee centennial address, a history titled “Blount College and the University of Tennessee.” He was president of the Alumni Association from 1909–10 through 1911–12, was a lecturer at the university’s College of Law from 1898 to 1907, and served as trustee from 1897 to 1923. He replaced his father as a trustee of the East Tennessee Female Institute and was a founding member and president of the board of George Peabody College for Teachers (1907–30).
In 1907 he was appointed US assistant attorney general. Seventeen months later, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him US district judge of eastern and middle Tennessee. In 1923 Sanford was nominated as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court by President Warren G. Harding and was confirmed by Congress. He took his seat upon the bench on February 19, 1923. He was the keynote speaker at the 1924 Bar Association Conference in London and, a few days later, delivered the same speech, in French, at a reception held by the Paris Bar. As justice of the Supreme Court, he delivered 130 opinions during his seven years of service. He died suddenly (of uremic poisoning following a tooth extraction) on March 8, 1930. His best-known opinions for the court were that of the majority in Gitlow v. New York, which held that the free speech protections of the First Amendment applied to the states and in Okanogan Indians v United States, which upheld the power of the US president’s “pocket veto.” He was a member of the Tennessee Historical Society, a trustee of Lawson McGhee Library, president of the Bar Association of Tennessee, and a contributor to its published Proceedings. He is a member of the Alumni Academic Hall of Fame.
In 1927, at the dedication of Tennessee Hall to the Law Department, his wife’s family, the Woodruffs, presented the College of Law with a portrait of Judge Sanford, which was subsequently loaned to Knoxville’s Federal Court.