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SULC’s Juris Doctor (JD) program offers professional training in the areas of civil (specific to Louisiana) and common law. The program aims to prepare its graduates with the skills and knowledge to be highly effective, competent, and ethical professionals who possess a deep sense of community.

Though the program of study emphasizes the substantive and procedural law of Louisiana, with its French and Spanish origins (civil law), Anglo-American law (common law) is also well integrated into the curriculum.

The civil law system of Louisiana offers law students a unique educational opportunity. The program of instruction examines the historical background of the civil law system and its development in the United States. In addition, fundamental differences in the method, approach, and the results reached between the civil and common law systems is analyzed.

Students are also trained in the art of advocacy, legal research, legal theory and social purposes of legal principles. Techniques to strengthen the students’ abilities in legal reasoning are an integral part of the educational objectives of the Law Center.

As equally important to the study of the law, students are instructed in the ethics of the legal profession with emphasis on the professional responsibility of the lawyer to society.

On December 16, 1946, in response to a lawsuit by an African-American resident seeking to attend law school at a state institution, the Louisiana State Board of Education took “positive steps to establish a Law School for Negroes at Southern University…to be in operation for the 1947-1948 session.”

Plans for the law school were approved by the State Board of Education at its January 10, 1947, meeting. On June 14, 1947, the Board of Liquidation of State Debt appropriated $40,000 for the operation of the school. The Southern University Law School was officially opened in September 1947 to provide legal education for African American students.

Southern University Law Center graduates, beginning with the legendary civil rights attorney, political leader, and educator Jesse N. Stone, Jr., Alvin Basile Jones, Leroy White, Ellyson Fredrick Dyson, and Alex Louis Pitcher of the class of 1950, have spread across the state and nation as trailblazers in the legal profession, securing equal rights for others. To date, the Law Center has more than 2,500 graduates and is one of the nation’s most racially diverse law schools.