Baton Rouge, Louisiana · Founded 1947
“The law school Louisiana built to avoid integration — and the Black lawyers who turned it into an engine of justice.”
Spring 2021 graduation: summa grads Meghan Matt, Olivia Montgomery, and Jay Morris; Golden Alumni class of 1971 honored; the class exited to a brass band second line.
Full May 21, 2022 commencement from the F.G. Clark Activity Center — the school's flagship public graduation ritual.
May 17, 2025 commencement at the F.G. Clark Activity Center; confirmed via the Law Center's official commencement announcement.
May 18, 2024 commencement; keynote by alumnus Cleo Fields, the former congressman and youngest Louisiana state senator in history.
May 20, 2023 commencement livestream; speaker was Judge Dana Douglas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, per the Southern University System calendar.
Fall 2025 commencement ceremony — the Law Center holds both spring and fall graduations each year.
The College Tour segment: student Carlos explains why he chose SULC — one of six HBCU law schools — and retells the Charles Hatfield founding story in his own words.
First graduating class; civil rights attorney; Law Center dean 1971–72; Louisiana Supreme Court associate justice pro tempore; president of the Southern University System 1974/75–1985.
First African American ever elected to the Louisiana Supreme Court, via the Chisom v. Edwards voting-rights litigation.
19th Judicial District Court judge; plaintiff in the landmark Clark v. Roemer judicial-election case.
Civil rights attorney who litigated Clark v. Roemer; Law Center professor; former NAACP national board member; U.S. delegate to the UN General Assembly.
U.S. Congressman for Louisiana's 4th District (1993–97); elected to the Louisiana State Senate at 24, the youngest in state history; 1995 gubernatorial candidate; delivered the spring 2024 commencement address.
First African American chief judge of the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal (January 1, 2023); former state representative and senator; delivered the fall 2022 commencement address.
Governor of Louisiana, 1996–2004.
Mayor-President of Baton Rouge, 2005–2016.
Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission since 2020; served as chair in 2021 — the first Black woman to chair the FEC.
Miss Louisiana 2000 and Miss America 2001 first runner-up; attorney, legal analyst, and television personality.
Former United States Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana.
Senior vice president and chief tax officer of Walmart Stores, Inc.
District Attorney for the 19th Judicial District, East Baton Rouge Parish.
Federal magistrate judge, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana (appointed 1985).
First African American to maintain a private legal practice in Japan as a registered foreign attorney (gaiben).
Tenth president of Grambling State University; served in both houses of the Louisiana Legislature (House 2000–2012, Senate 2012–2016).
Louisiana House 1996–2000 and State Senate 2000–2012, District 17.
Judge of the Louisiana Court of Appeal, Third Circuit; former state representative.
Judge and 40 Under 40 honoree; delivered the fall 2024 commencement address.
Former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates.
In January 1946, Charles J. Hatfield III of New Orleans — a World War II veteran and Xavier graduate working for the postal service — wrote to the LSU registrar seeking admission to law school. LSU law dean Paul M. Hebert replied that LSU 'does not admit colored students' and told Hatfield to apply to Southern University, which had no law school at all. Hatfield was academically qualified and barred purely by race, and he decided to fight the dodge rather than accept it.
In February 1946 Hatfield engaged attorneys A.P. Tureaud and Joseph A. Thornton, and that October Tureaud — assisted by NAACP attorneys Thurgood Marshall, Robert Carter, and Louis Berry — filed suit in Baton Rouge's 19th Judicial District Court against LSU's Board of Supervisors. The suit demanded LSU admit Hatfield, since Louisiana had no law school for Black students anywhere in the state. It was one of the South's earliest direct legal assaults on segregated graduate education, years before Sweatt v. Painter reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
On October 19, 1946, to the surprise of many observers, the court granted a writ of mandamus commanding LSU to admit Hatfield for the 1946–47 school year. LSU had no intention of integrating; within days the state moved to create a separate institution instead. The suit was dismissed in April 1947, and Hatfield never enrolled — Tureaud, fearing for his client's life after threats on it, advised him to accept a teaching fellowship at Atlanta University instead. Hatfield earned an M.A. in sociology there in 1948, then taught at Joseph S. Clark and George Washington Carver high schools in New Orleans until his retirement in 1979.
On December 16, 1946, 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.' The move was pure separate-but-equal strategy: create a Black law school so LSU would never have to integrate. A joint committee of LSU, State Board, and Department of Education representatives had recommended the workaround back in September 1946.
At its January 10, 1947 meeting, the State Board of Education formally approved plans for the school, designed with a three-year program for college graduates and a six-year track combining law study with the College of Arts and Sciences. On June 14, 1947, the Board of Liquidation of State Debt appropriated $40,000 to operate the school — the entire seed money for a law school, a shoestring budget even in 1947 dollars. The chronic underfunding defined the school's first decades, and founding dean A.A. Lenoir had to build a credible institution out of almost nothing.
In September 1947 the Southern University School of Law opened for instruction with 13 students and four full-time professors, holding classes on the second floor of the university library. Aguinaldo Alfonso Lenoir Sr. served as founding dean. The school opened as a Plessy institution — separate, and deliberately unequal, twelve miles from the white law school at LSU that had refused Hatfield.
The class of 1950 produced the school's first six graduates: Ellyson Frederick Dyson, St. Elmore Johnson, Alvin Basile Jones, Leroy White, Jesse N. Stone Jr., and Alex Louis Pitcher. They fanned out across Louisiana as the state's first generation of Black lawyers, filing the cases and winning the offices that forced desegregation. Stone became the most famous of them — a civil rights attorney who would later lead the school and the entire Southern University System.
Revius O. Ortique Jr. graduated in 1956, part of the school's first decade of alumni. Decades later, the voting-rights case Chisom v. Edwards would carry him onto the Louisiana Supreme Court as the first African American ever elected to it. His career embodied the school's long game: train Black lawyers, and the bench itself would change.
In 1969 Robert L. Comeaux, a white student, enrolled at the Law Center, and all four of Louisiana's law schools were finally desegregated. The school founded to keep Black students out of LSU Law was now educating students of every race. The first white student graduated in May 1972, and by 2009 the alumni rolls were roughly 58 percent African American, 40 percent white, and 2 percent other.
A.A. Lenoir led the institution from its founding until 1970 — twenty-three years of building a law school under segregation, then steering it through the first years of desegregation. His successor was Vanue B. Lacour of Shreveport, one of the school's original faculty members and a noted legal scholar, who served as dean for 1970–71. The main law building, A.A. Lenoir Hall, was named for the founding dean.
In 1971 Jesse N. Stone Jr., of the first graduating class of 1950, became dean. The Shreveport native refocused instruction on flexibility for varied student needs and on testing the role of law in solving social problems. Stone later became president of the Southern University System (1974/75–1985) and an associate justice pro tempore of the Louisiana Supreme Court; the Jesse N. Stone Lecture Hall and an endowed professorship in his name honor that arc.
From 1972 to 1974 the dean was Louis Berry, the Alexandria civil rights attorney who had been one of Hatfield's own lawyers in the 1946 suit. Berry was the first African American permitted to practice law in his native Alexandria in Rapides Parish. He brought the 'seriousness of purpose' ethic that still anchors the school's academic culture, and the Law Center's civil rights institute now bears his name.
In 1974 B.K. Agnihotri became dean and stayed until 2001, the longest tenure in school history. He led the expansion of facilities, programs, faculty, staff, and the student body, steering the school from a small segregated-era holdover into a modern law center. An endowed professorship now bears his name, currently held by Professor Angela Allen-Bell.
Effective July 1, 1985, after 38 years of operation as a School of Law, the Southern University Board of Supervisors redesignated the school the Southern University Law Center. The change was meant to raise the school's image in the region and the nation — and it upgraded the chief executive's title from dean to chancellor. Agnihotri thus became the school's first chancellor, closing the book on the 'School of Law' era.
In 1986 Judge Janice Clark, a 1976 alumna, became the plaintiff in Clark v. Roemer, challenging Louisiana's at-large judicial elections; fellow alumni Ernest Johnson and Arthur Thomas were among the attorneys who litigated it. The follow-on case Chisom v. Edwards, filed in New Orleans, reached the U.S. Supreme Court and led to the election of Revius O. Ortique Jr. (class of 1956) as the first African American on the Louisiana Supreme Court. In February 2016 the Law Center commemorated the 30th anniversary of both cases with a Black History Month program drawing state dignitaries.
At the May 2002 commencement, Charles Joseph Hatfield received the first honorary Juris Doctor ever awarded by the Law Center — the degree the state denied him in 1946. A cancer patient, he died less than two months later. Professor Evelyn Wilson chronicled his life in 'Laws, Customs, and Rights: Charles Hatfield and His Family, A Louisiana History' (Heritage Books, 2004), and the Law Center declared 2016 the Year of Charles J. Hatfield III.
In October 2003 the Board of Supervisors unanimously named Freddie Pitcher Jr. the sixth chief executive of the Law Center. He inherited the school's Achilles heel: first-time bar passage stuck between 30 and 45 percent, even though 94 percent of graduates eventually passed and were admitted within 18 months. Pitcher rebuilt the legal writing program — from two faculty to a director plus six full-time faculty — tweaked admissions, and launched an in-house bar review, and first-time passage began to climb. July 2025 first-time takers passed at 75 percent.
Graduates of the 2007 and 2008 classes were hired by the international firm Sidley Austin — five in two years, three in New York and two in Chicago, with at least ten total over five years. For a small public HBCU law school, placing graduates at one of the country's elite firms (where Barack and Michelle Obama once worked) was a statement. It validated Pitcher's turnaround and the school's national recruiting pull.
In 2009 a 13,400-square-foot North Wing was added to A.A. Lenoir Hall, bringing the facility to 98,400 square feet. During the 2010–11 academic year the Clinical Education Annex opened next door, letting the in-house clinics operate on a law-firm model with room for student-faculty collaboration across clinics. The building now holds a 3,133-square-foot atrium, an 850-square-foot courtyard, seminar rooms, a moot courtroom, and full wireless audio-video for distance learning.
Freddie Pitcher Jr. stepped down in June 2015 after a system leadership overhaul, and John K. Pierre — on the faculty since 1990 and vice chancellor since 2006 — became interim chancellor on July 1, 2015. On March 18, 2016, the Board named Pierre the seventh chancellor. Pierre, an Army JAG officer turned tax and commercial law professor, had spent seven years as co-counsel for the Baton Rouge NAACP in the city's school desegregation case and co-counseled the landmark McWaters v. FEMA.
The Law Center declared 2016 the Year of Charles J. Hatfield III, honoring the man whose rejected application created the school. The February 26 commemoration marked 30 years since Clark v. Roemer and Chisom v. Edwards, drawing dignitaries including Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Governor Edwin Edwards. It was the school publicly owning its origin story: born of segregation, built for justice.
In 2019 the Law Center, in partnership with Penn State Law, won the Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory Leading Edge Prize for Educational Innovation. The award recognized the school's push into experiential, technology-driven legal education. For a school founded on a $40,000 appropriation, a national innovation prize marked how far the institution had traveled.
On March 14, 2023, the Law Center held its inaugural Henrietta Lacks Symposium, themed 'Seeing Women Through the Lens of Genetic Justice, Reproductive Justice, and Criminal Justice.' Headliners included civil rights attorney Ben Crump, NAACP Legal Defense Fund counsel Victor Jones, and cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Edgar Feinberg. The symposium planted the school's flag in the national conversation on medical racism and genetic justice.
In October 2024 Louisiana Public Broadcasting premiered 'Southern University Law Center: A Civil Rights Dream Come True,' a digital-first documentary made with Maryland Public Television for the national HBCU Week NOW project, airing on YouTube and nationally on the WORLD Channel, with an on-campus premiere and panel at SULC. The same year John K. Pierre left to become chancellor of Southern University and A&M College, and Alvin R. Washington stepped in as interim chancellor — now serving as Dean.
On May 16, 2026, the Law Center honored more than 200 graduates at the F.G. Clark Activity Center, with 2002 alumna Erin Monroe — Market Vice President for Greater Louisiana at Cox Communications — delivering the keynote. The ceremony was livestreamed on the Law Center's YouTube channel, continuing the school's tradition of large, public, celebratory graduations.
SULC is a graduate law school with no marching band and no athletics. Do not confuse with the Southern University Human Jukebox (the undergraduate campus's band).
Still digging this up — check back soon.
Southern University Law Center's Greek life is professional, not social: Delta Theta Phi's A. A. Lenoir Senate (chartered 1971), Phi Alpha Delta, and Phi Delta Phi are law fraternities among the Law Center's 46 student organizations. There is no Divine Nine or traditional undergraduate social-Greek scene at the law school. Members commonly hold D9 memberships from their undergraduate years.
Still digging this up — check back soon.
The school's first home: four full-time professors and 13 students meeting on the second floor of Southern University's library. The quarters matched the $40,000 budget — deliberately unequal to LSU Law twelve miles away.
The Law Center's permanent home, named for founding dean Aguinaldo Alfonso Lenoir Sr. The building holds administrative and faculty offices, classrooms, study areas, student-organization space, seminar rooms, the law library with a computer-assisted learning lab, and a moot courtroom on the 512-acre Southern University campus on Scott's Bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.
A 13,400-square-foot North Wing was added to A.A. Lenoir Hall, bringing the facility to 98,400 square feet. The addition gave the growing enrollment — full-time day, part-time day, and evening divisions — room to breathe.
Opened next door to the main hall during the 2010–11 academic year. The new space lets the in-house clinics operate on a law-firm model and makes student-faculty collaboration across clinics practical. The Law Center's clinical program has been ranked 42nd of 216 clinical programs nationally by the ABA.
The main entrance opens into a 3,133-square-foot atrium — the school's gathering place for receptions, luncheons, exhibits, and registration — backed by an 850-square-foot courtyard used for outdoor classes in spring. The entire Law Center went wireless with a state-of-the-art audio-video system for distance learning and internet broadcast.
The 2016 Year of Charles J. Hatfield III commemoration, the 30th-anniversary Clark/Chisom program, and the ongoing Judicial Wall of Fame turned the campus itself into a civil-rights archive — alumni judges honored on the wall, Hatfield's story centered in school identity.
The Leading Edge Prize for Educational Innovation recognized the Law Center's technology-driven, experiential curriculum — the programmatic upgrade that matched the physical one.
The Law Center's five research institutes anchor its public mission: the Louis A. Berry Institute for Civil Rights & Justice, the Cannabis Compliance, Law, and Policy Institute, the Native American Law & Policy Institute, the Mixed Reality Virtual Innovation Gaming and Esports Institute, and the Southern University Strategic Leadership Institute.
The in-house clinical roster grew to twelve: Administrative/Civil Law, Bankruptcy, Criminal Law, Disaster Law, Divorce & Domestic Violence, Domestic Violence, Elder & Successions Law, Elder Law, Juvenile Law, Low-income Taxpayer, and Mediation clinics, serving Baton Rouge's impoverished and underrepresented communities on a law-firm model.
The Southern University System Foundation's campaign for the Law Center totals $64.9 million: a $23 million A.A. Lenoir Hall expansion (59,400 sq ft), $10 million renovation of the existing hall, a $15 million five-story parking garage for 650 cars with retail space, plus site and landscaping work — designed to grow enrollment and student amenities.
'Southern University Law Center: A Civil Rights Dream Come True,' produced by Louisiana Public Broadcasting with Maryland Public Television for the national HBCU Week NOW project, premiered on YouTube and nationally on the WORLD Channel, with an on-campus screening and panel in Lenoir Hall rooms 129–130.
The annual Alumni & Friends Round-Up (April 2–5, 2025) unveiled the newest Judicial Wall of Fame inductees — Hon. Brittany B. Arvie '15, Hon. Guy E. Bradberry '89, Hon. Brittany B. Jorden '14 — alongside Distinguished Alumni and Hall of Fame honors, cementing the alumni-recognition tradition as a campus fixture.
Historical vice-chancellors documented in catalogs include Russell Jones (Academic Affairs), Roederick White (Student Affairs), and Elaine Simmons (Records and Enrollment Management) under Chancellor Pitcher; current vice-chancellor roster was not verified and is omitted rather than guessed.
Stepped in when John K. Pierre left for the Southern University and A&M College chancellorship; presided over the LPB documentary premiere.
Army JAG turned tax/commercial law professor; co-counseled Baton Rouge school desegregation litigation for the NAACP and McWaters v. FEMA.
Holds the professorship named for the Law Center's longest-serving chief executive; a leading voice on civil rights and criminal justice.
Class of 1976; litigated Clark v. Roemer; former NAACP national board member; U.S. delegate to the UN General Assembly; 2007 Alumni Hall of Fame inductee; holds a U.S. patent.
Author of 'Laws, Customs, and Rights: Charles Hatfield and His Family, A Louisiana History' (2004), the definitive account of the man whose lawsuit created the school.
SULC is a graduate professional school, not a residential undergraduate campus: no dorms, no athletics, no homecoming in the undergraduate sense. What it has instead is a working lawyer's culture — 46 student organizations including the Student Bar Association, Moot Court Board, National Black Law Students Association chapter, and Trial Advocacy Board; two journals (the Southern University Law Review and the Journal of Race, Gender & Poverty); and twelve in-house clinics where third-year students handle real cases for Baton Rouge's poor. Students learn both Louisiana civil law and common law, can add a joint JD/MPA with the Nelson Mandela School of Public Policy, and can study abroad in London. The student body is among the nation's most diverse for a law school — roughly 58 percent African American, 40 percent white in 2009 figures, with students from 20 states and multiple countries.