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The Association of American Law Schools was founded in 1900 at Saratoga Springs, New York, with Professor James Bradley Thayer of Harvard Law School as its first President. In 1963, Professor Michael H. Cardozo became the Association's first Executive Director and established the Association's national office. The AALS was incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia as a non-profit educational organization on February 2, 1971.
The AALS seeks to improve the legal
profession through legal education and is the learned
society for law teachers. In order to achieve this
objective, the Association holds an Annual Meeting, sponsors
professional development programs, produces a Directory of Law Teachers,
sponsors teacher placement services, and compiles
statistics.
The AALS is a voluntary membership
organization of 176 law schools. The Association visits
member law schools periodically to review whether schools
are complying with AALS Bylaws and Executive Committee
Regulations.
In 1989, the AALS realized that
documents telling the story of American legal education were
so numerous that a depository separate from the Association
headquarters was necessary. The Association's records were
assembled and placed in the University of Illinois Archives
on July 1, 1989, to ensure their availability for future
research.
The AALS Archives includes
substantial material about legal education. It also includes
materials about academic and legal ethics, minorities and
women in law, and academic freedom and tenure. The archives
also includes biographical sketches of law teachers and
academic administrators and the papers of past AALS
presidents Vernon X. Miller (1951-52, 1957, 1962-66), Robert
E. Mathews (1951-59), F. D. G. Ribble (1952), Jefferson B.
Fordham (1958, 1961-62, 1964), Samuel D. Thurman (1961-64),
William B. Lockhart (1968-70), and Eugene F. Scoles
(1974-81), AALS secretary-treasurer Arthur T. Martin
(1944-46), and AALS Archives committee chair Roger F. Jacobs
(1987-89). The AALS Archives is a rich source for research
into the history and current status of legal education in
the United States and the development and application of
bylaws and regulations to law schools.
Access to the AALS Archives is
provided by means of a classification system of Record
Series with supplemental finding aids which give greater
detail as to the contents of the collection. As of July 2021,
the AALS Archives contained 184 record
series totaling approximately 306.4
cubic feet of hard copy holdings (the equivalent of over 204
filing cabinet drawers) and 156.46 gigabytes of electronic
holdings.
Users may access the records based
on a three-level categorization of record series agreed upon
by AALS and the University Archivist.
Open record series are available
without restriction. To access restricted and confidential
record series, researchers must make application to and
receive approval from AALS headquarters. Materials
may not be removed from the Archives without the written
permission of the University Archivist or the AALS Executive
Director. For researchers unable to visit the Archives,
copies of documents may be secured following the completion
and approval of a User Application Form.
Access
Policies and User Application Form
Open Record Series Open Electronic Records |
Restricted Record Series |
Confidential Record Series |