Southern Methodist University School of Law
http://www.law.smu.edu/
Dean's Welcome
I hope your visit to our web site will give you some idea of the quality, richness, and excitement of a legal education at the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University. With a student body of deliberately controlled size, a faculty with superb credentials, and excellent physical facilities, the School of Law seeks to give each student a personal educational experience of the highest order.
As you will see on our site, the school has a diverse and highly talented faculty whose members are dedicated to teaching. Not only do they hold outstanding academic credentials, but virtually all of them also have had practical experience before entering their teaching careers. Consequently, they provide the invaluable link between the theory of classroom instruction and the reality of legal practice. The Dedman School of Law enjoys a national and international reputation, with its graduates practicing in every state of the Union and in many foreign countries.
We at the School take pride in offering our students a total educational experience, including an active Student Bar Association, moot court and mock trial activities, five respected law journals, a summer program in Oxford, England, a Career Services Office, and a comprehensive clinical program, including one of the very few in taxation. While our curriculum is extremely rich, we are still small enough to take a personal interest in each student. The school's law quadrangle provides an admirable setting for learning and includes the Underwood Law Library, a modern and comprehensive research facility equipped with state-of-the-art instructional technologies.
Our student body is diverse, intelligent, and inquisitive. Students come from a variety of backgrounds and from all over the United States, although the majority are from Texas and surrounding regions. Upon graduation, they enter private practice, government practice, and the corporate sector, or they engage in public interest work, serve as prosecutors, or obtain judicial clerkships.
I hope that you will have an opportunity to visit our campus. Such an experience will give you a real sense of the school in a way that written words and photographs can only suggest. We wish you the best of luck in your legal career.
John B. Attanasio
Judge James Noel Dean and Professor of Law & Judge William Hawley Atwell Chair of Constitutional Law
Dedman School of Law