The University of Texas School of Law was founded in 1883. The School of Law began as The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Law when the university was founded in 1883. The law school started with two professors and 52 students in the basement of the university’s Old Main Building. The Department of Law appointed its first dean, John C. Townes, in 1901, and moved out of the basement and into its own building in 1908. The Department of Law became The University of Texas School of Law in 1920. By 1935, it had become one of the largest law schools in the United States, and required a new building. In 1952 construction began on Townes Hall. Two additional buildings were later added: Jones Hall, completed in 1981, which became home to the Tarlton Law Library, which houses the Susman Academic Center; and the Connally Center, dedicated in 2001, which houses the Eidman Courtroom, the Advocacy Program and much of the Clinical Program. In 2021, renovations to outdoor spaces to the north side of Townes Hall included the Patman Family Plaza and Dee J. Kelly Courtyard. Prior to the
Civil Rights Movement, the school was limited to white students, but the school's admissions policies were challenged from two different directions in high-profile 20th century federal court cases that were important to the long struggle over segregation, integration, and diversity in American education.
Sweatt v. Painter (1950) The school was sued in the civil rights case of
Sweatt v. Painter (1950). The case involved
Heman Marion Sweatt, a black man who was refused admission to the school on the grounds that substantially equivalent facilities (meeting the requirements of
Plessy v. Ferguson) were offered by the state's law school for blacks. When the plaintiff first applied to the University of Texas, there was no law school in Texas which admitted blacks. Instead of granting the plaintiff a
writ of
mandamus, the Texas trial court "
continued" the case for six months to allow the state time to create a law school for blacks, which it developed in Houston. The
Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision, saying that the separate school failed to offer Sweatt an equal legal education. The court noted that the University of Texas School of Law had 16 full-time and three part-time professors, 850 students and a
law library of 65,000
volumes, while the separate school the state set up for blacks had five full-time professors, 23 students and a library of 16,500 volumes. But the court held that even "more important" than these quantitative differences were differences such as "reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige". Because the separate school could not provide an "equal" education, the court ordered that Hemann Sweatt be admitted to University of Texas School of Law.
Sweatt v. Painter was the first major
test case in the long-term litigation strategy of
Thurgood Marshall and the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund that led to the landmark Supreme Court decision in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Marshall and the NAACP correctly calculated that they could dismantle segregation by building up a series of precedents, beginning at Texas Law, before moving on to the more explosive question of racial integration in elementary schools.
Hopwood v. Texas (1996) In 1992,
plaintiff Cheryl Hopwood, a
White American woman, sued the school on the grounds that she had not been admitted even though her grades and test scores were better than those of some minority candidates who were admitted pursuant to an
affirmative action program.
Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka later described Hopwood as "the perfect plaintiff to question the fairness of reverse discrimination" because of her academic credentials and personal hardships which she had endured (including a young daughter suffering from a muscular disease). With her attorney
Steven Wayne Smith, later a two-year member of the
Texas Supreme Court, Hopwood won her case,
Hopwood v. Texas, in the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled that the school "may not use race as a factor in deciding which applicants to admit in order to achieve a diverse student body, to combat the perceived effects of a hostile environment at the law school, to alleviate the law school's poor reputation in the minority community, or to eliminate any present effects of past discrimination by actors other than the law school". The case did not reach the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court ruled in
Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), a case involving the
University of Michigan, that the
United States Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body". This effectively reversed the decision of
Hopwood v. Texas. ==Admissions==