page_title: University of Texas School of Law
section_title: Sweatt v. Painter (1950)
hierarchical_section_title: University of Texas School of Law / History / Sweatt v. Painter (1950)
caption_attribution_description: English: Postcard showing the Law Building of the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, USA.
context_page_description: The University of Texas School of Law is the law school of the University of Texas at Austin. Texas Law is consistently ranked as one of the top law schools in the United States and admits roughly 20% of its applicants. Every year, Texas Law places a significant part of its class into law firms, where median base salaries start at $190,000. According to Texas Law's 2016 disclosures, 80.66% of the Class of 2016 obtained full-time, long-term, JD-required employment nine months after graduation.
  The school has 19,000 living alumni. Amongst its alumni are U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker; U.S. Secretary of Treasury Lloyd Bentsen; White House Senior Advisor Paul Begala; U.S. Supreme Court Justice and U.S. Attorney General Tom C. Clark; Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Sam Rayburn; litigator Sarah Weddington who represented Jane Roe in the seminal case Roe v Wade; and Gustavo C. Garcia, Carlos Cadena, James DeAnda lead litigators for the landmark civil rights case Hernandez v. Texas.
context_section_description: 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 of Law 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.
caption: Illustration of the Law Building on a postcard (1908–1924).
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