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About Dedman School of Law

The Dedman School of Law at SMU has been an innovator in legal education since 1925. Today the nationally ranked School offers Juris Doctor, Master's and Doctor of Laws degrees, as well as the J.D. through a new evening law program. Since the 1950s the School's Master's program in comparative law has trained lawyers from throughout the world who have become leading jurists, government officials, and attorneys in their home countries.

The School also was one of the first in the nation to sponsor legal clinics serving low-income citizens in the community. Providing services for the needy as well as practical experience for law students, the clinics focus on civil, criminal, and tax law, along with child advocacy. The School's law library houses the largest private law collection in the Southwest. SMU’s law alumni population numbers over 10,500 throughout the world.

• This year’s entering students had a median LSAT of 162 and an undergraduate GPA of 3.73. In the evening program, entering students had a median LSAT of 159 and an undergraduate GPA of 3.45 (32 percent of the evening class has graduate degrees). We had 582 applicants and enrolled 95 students in our evening program, and had 2420 applicants and enrolled 181 students in the day program. Minority students comprise 26 percent of this year’s entering full-time day class and 18 percent of this year’s entering part-time evening class.

• This year’s entering students came from Duke, Georgetown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Notre Dame, Purdue, the University of Michigan, the Air Force Academy, and Berkeley, among other schools.

• The Dedman School of Law has organized several Supreme Court Summits with Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Stevens, O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States as well as justices from the highest courts of Europe, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Russia. These have been organized by Dean John Attanasio and have included many other law school faculty members (April 2000, January 2001, July 2004).

• The Dedman School of Law is the headquarters of the Appellate Judicial Education Institute, whose conferences attract over 100 appellate judges and another 100 lawyers from all over the United States.

• The Dedman School of Law had one of the first master’s programs in comparative and international law and tax law. SMU’s clinical programs also were among the first in the nation. Our public service requirement was among the first in the nation. For many years, we have conferred the degree of Doctor of Juridical Sciences.

• Our chaired professors include: Joseph Norton, who lectures on banking reforms worldwide and holds honorary doctorates at the Universities of Stockholm and London; Peter Winship, who has done extensive drafting for various commissions of the United Nations; Alan Bromberg, an authority in corporate and securities law who has been quoted extensively in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times; Marc Steinberg, who has organized symposia for the New York Stock Exchange and corporate counsel of Fortune 500 and other major corporations in the DFW Metroplex; William Dorsaneo, chair of the Texas Supreme Court’s Task Force for Revision of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure; Regis Campfield, who organizes annual national symposia on Estate Planning for SMU, the Communities Foundation of Texas and Notre Dame; Ellen Pryor, a member of the American Law Institute Advisory Committee that is drafting the Restatement (Third) of Torts; Roy Anderson, a commentator for the ABA Task Force of advisors to the UCC Article 2 Drafting Committee; Joseph McKnight, Rhodes Scholar, who was head of the Family Code project which redrafted the Texas Marital Property Act; and John Lowe, who was president of the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation. All have published leading books and articles in their fields. (See also our faculty Web site.)

• Among our distinguished visiting professors have been Pius Langa, then Vice President of the South African Constitutional Court and now President of that Court; Yvonne Mokgoro, Justice of the South African Constitutional Court; Sir Guenter Treitel, Vinerian Professor of Law Emeritus of Oxford University; Richard Arnold, former Chief Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit; Patrick E. Higginbotham, Judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit; Bernard Grossfeld, Professor of Law at the Muenster University in Muenster, Germany; and Alexander (R.A.) "Sandy" McCall Smith, best-selling author and emeritus professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh.

• Some of the nation’s most distinguished law journals can be found at SMU. The International Lawyer is the most widely distributed U.S. international law review in the world. The Journal of Air Law and Commerce is the oldest scholarly periodical devoted exclusively to the legal and economic problems affecting aviation and space.

• Six of SMU’s alumni have served on the Texas Supreme Court, one on the Nevada Supreme Court, and one on the Missouri Supreme Court. Three have been justices on the Japanese Supreme Court and others have served on the highest courts of the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Egypt, and Korea. Our graduates work in over 70 countries. Many have become judges, CEO’s, general counsels, bar presidents, and managing partners and named partners of major law firms. Others have become ministers, ambassadors, chiefs of staff of presidents.