SMU Dedman School of Law
The information on this page was provided by the law school.
Official Guide to ABA-Approved JD Programs
Founded in 1925, SMU Dedman School of Law is located on a magnificent tree-lined campus in a beautiful residential neighborhood just five miles north of downtown Dallas. SMU offers an intimate learning community within a vibrant urban center.
With a relatively small entering class size, an outstanding teaching faculty, and distinguished guest lecturers, SMU offers a scholarly community with fantastic opportunities both inside and outside the classroom. SMU also has a well-rounded, student body from well over 100 colleges and universities, 30 states, and over 10 countries.
The JD Program
Students find a sophisticated curriculum that complements SMU’s wide breadth of class offerings with extensive depth of focus. The JD curriculum is designed to achieve the goal of producing lawyers who are capable and responsible professionals through its emphasis on providing substantive knowledge, ethical and moral training, and practical skills to serve clients in local, national, and global communities.
Each JD student must complete 87 credit hours. Thirty-one of these hours comprise the mandatory first-year curriculum. After the first year, students must complete a course in professional responsibility, two upper-level writing courses (including an edited writing seminar in which an extensive scholarly, expository writing project is reviewed and critiqued by the professor), Constitutional Law II, and a practical skills course.
SMU offers many small classes in which students will get to know their classmates and professors. Each entering class is divided into three sections. Each semester, first-year students are assigned to a legal research, writing, and advocacy class of fewer than 25 students. Most of SMU’s upper-division courses have fewer than 25 students, and over 80 percent have fewer than 50 students.
SMU’s rich upper-division curricular offerings, with over 150 upper-division courses per year, provide students with a wide range of courses and the freedom to tailor a program of study that furthers their professional and personal goals. With traditional strengths in business, litigation, tax, and international law, the curriculum extends to many areas, including intellectual property, health care, environmental, and family law.
Externship Programs
SMU Dedman Law offers a wide array of corporate, judicial, government, regulatory, and public interest externships for course credit. Popular externships include those with the US Attorney’s Office, the SEC, and the EPA. Additionally, SMU’s Corporate Counsel Externship program allows students to learn hands-on in corporate legal departments for one semester and attend a weekly class to learn about substantive and ethical issues facing in-house counsel.
Legal Clinics
Clinics offer students an opportunity to engage in the practice of law for up to six hours of course credit. Currently, SMU has nine clini opportunities, including: the civil and consumer clinic, the criminal clinic, the Federal tax clinic, the first amendment clinic, the innocence clinic, the patent law clinic, the small business and trademark clinic, the VanSickle family law clinic, and the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women. Legal services provided by the clinic expose our students to a needed form of legal practice to serve some of society's most vulnerable populations.
Public Service
SMU Dedman School of Law was the first law school in the state of Texas to implement a mandatory Public Service Graduation Requirement. Since 1996, all J.D. students at SMU Dedman School of Law have been required to complete a minimum of 30 hours of law-related public service to be eligible to graduate. These hours must be uncompensated and not for academic credit.
The goal of the public service graduation requirement is to enhance the legal profession and the law school curriculum by exposing lawyers-to-be to the importance of and need for a life-long commitment to public service. The program allows students to gain legal experience, learn and develop practical lawyering skills in a hands-on setting, explore different areas of law, cultivate professional contacts in the legal community, and provides early exposure to the need for legal assistance in the community.
From the program’s inception, SMU Dedman School of Law students have displayed their passion for public service. Each year, the students substantially exceed the minimum 30-hour requirement. For example, the class of 2024 performed 17,393 hours of public service, for an average of over 71 hours per student. We were so impressed by the outstanding display of dedication to service that we established a Pro Bono Honor Roll in 2015 to recognize those students at Graduation who donated over 200 hours of law-related public service during law school. We are ecstatic that 30 graduates in the class of 2024 were listed on the Pro Bono Honor Roll for having donated 200 or more hours of public service and of that group, and 7 of these graduates each volunteered more than 401 hours!
Career Placement and Bar Passage
Learn more about career placement at
SMU Dedman School of Law
Tuition and Aid
SMU provides over 90 percent of its entering class with scholarship assistance. SMU law scholarships, including several full-tuition Hutchison scholarships, are awarded on the basis of the admission application.
In addition, two private foundations, the Hatton W. Sumners Foundation and the Dallas Bar Foundation, fund and select five to nine additional full-tuition scholarships per entering class. Both foundations require a separate scholarship application, linked on the SMU Admissions Office’s website. The Sarah T. Hughes Scholarships, sponsored by the Dallas Bar Foundation, is awarded to outstanding applicants. The Sumners Scholars are selected from a competitive pool of applicants with strong academics and extracurricular activities. To be considered for the Hatton W. Sumners and Sarah T. Hughes Scholarships, you must be accepted for admission by February 15. (To be admitted by February 15, you must have a complete application for admission on file no later than January 15.) The Hutchison and Hatton W. Sumners Scholarships require grades in the top third of the scholar’s law school class for maintenance.
Admission Decisions: Beyond the Numbers
SMU looks for excellent, well-rounded students with strong academic backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives that will enrich its educational community. Each application is considered in its entirety: LSAT score, undergraduate performance, graduate studies, work experience, activities, personal statement, and letters of recommendation are all read and evaluated. Applications may be accessed via an LSAC.org account.
Admitted Applicant Profile
