Collections

The Underwood Law Library houses Judge Barefoot Sanders’s court chambers papers concerning the Dallas Independent School District desegregation case. The Law Library has also received the litigation files of Mr. Ed Cloutman, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, and those of Mr. Robert Hyer Thomas, the Dallas Independent School District’s lead counsel. In addition to pleadings, motions, and briefs filed with the court, this collection includes Judge Sanders’s private notes and those of Mr. Cloutman and Mr. Thomas concerning the case, contemporaneous newspaper articles, and a wealth of analytical data compiled by the school district in response to Judge Sanders’s guidelines.

The institute is a international resource center, providing materials to researchers from courts, legislatures, bureaucracies, the legal profession, legal education, mass media, and telecommunications services.

J.L. Turner Sr. was born in 1869 in Dallas County where he was reared on a farm. Following high school graduation, Turner left Dallas County to attend Wiley College in the East Texas city of Marshall. He then moved to Chicago where he received his LL.B. degree in 1896 from the Kent College of Law, which today is IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. In 1898 Turner returned to Dallas and practiced law downtown at 155 Main Street with Joseph E. Wiley, probably Dallas’s second African-American attorney. Turner himself was only the third or fourth African-American attorney ever to practice in Dallas, and he maintained his practice until his death in 1951. In 2016, George Keaton Jr., a Turner descendant, donated to SMU's Underwood Law Library much of his family's archive of Turner materials.

The Law School Archives includes:

• Law School Catalogs/Bulletins, 1926-present
• Law School Commencement / Hooding Programs, 1942-present
• Legal Center News, 1958-1960
• Publications Describing the Law School's History
• Southwestern Legal Center News, 1948-1957
• The Brief (Law Alumni Magazine), 1965-2002
• The Quad (Law Alumni Magazine), 1988-present
• Yearbooks, 1966-1984 (all published)

This collection consists of more than 7,000 volumes, and almost as many titles, of antiquarian and historical legal materials collected by Professor Joseph W. McKnight.

Dedman School of Law’s Scholarship Repository includes our faculty scholarship and law journals.

The Joseph Gold Collection includes the professional papers and library of international monetary scholar, Sir Joseph Gold.

Browse our online exhibits.