Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

There are no access restrictions.

Use Restrictions

There are no restrictions on personal use. Permission to publish material from the Daniel D. Smith International School of Law collection must be obtained from Special Collections Research Center, George Mason University Libraries.

Preferred Citation

Daniel D. Smith International School of Law collection, C0086, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University Libraries.

Acquisition Information

Donated by Daniel Smith in 2008.

Processing Information

Processed by Tom Duncan in 2010. EAD markup completed by Tom Duncan in 2010.

Biographical Information

Daniel D. Smith is a lawyer and a co-founder of the International School of Law in 1972, now the George Mason University School of Law. After receiving a law degree at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1969, Smith was admitted to the Virginia Bar and to the District of Columbia Bar shortly thereafter. When the International School of Law opened in 1972, Smith held the position of Administrative Dean. He later served as Acting Dean and then Associate Professor until he moved from teaching to private practice in 1978. He served as a member of the American Bar Association and the Virginia Bar Association and helped found and chaired several organizations, including Young Life of Loudoun County, the Loudoun Vocational Education Fund, and Loudoun Healthcare Foundation.

Scope and Content

This collection contains materials related to Smith's role in creating the International School of Law, which later became the George Mason University School of Law, including correspondence, publications and faculty and board meeting minutes.

Series 1 of this collection provides information on the founding of the law school, the policies it held and the Judeo-Christian principles under which it was founded.

Series 2 contains the minutes from faculty and Board of Trustee meetings, arranged by date. These meetings discussed various topics from faculty appointments and dismissals on how to win American Bar Association accreditation.

Series 3 deals with the accreditation issue more directly. The International School of Law spent years attempting to gain the American Bar Association approval and suffered a number of setbacks and rejections. Series 3 contains the letters between the law school and the Association, suggestions for improvements and the actions taken by the school.

Series 4 contains a number of writings by Daniel Smith, including notes from the Contract Law course he taught for the law school while there.

Series 5 contains a number of publications by the International School of Law, in the form of newsletters, as well as correspondence with several States' Supreme Courts and the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners in attempts to allow their non-accredited graduates to sit for the bar exam. This series also contains material on the mergers and affiliations that the International School of Law tried to develop in order to gain accreditation. The merger with George Mason University is the last and most successful of these.

Series 6 contains information on the day-to-day administration of the International School of Law, complete with hirings and salaries as well as disciplinary action for Deans and professors who were dismissed and replaced during the law schools independency. This last series also contains the personal log book that Smith kept while employed by the law school.

Arrangement

Organized into six series.

Related Material

Special Collections holds other archives pertaining to the establishment of George Mason University and the development of academic departments.

Index Terms

Corporate Names:

• International School of Law.

Subjects:

• Law schools--Virginia.
• Law schools--Washington (D.C.)

Adjunct Descriptive Data