AUSTIN, Texas — The Tarlton Law Library at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law has been awarded a $15,375 grant from the Knowledge Gateway initiative of the University. The grant will fund the digitization of a large segment of the papers of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark which have been housed in the Law School’s library since 1985.
Justice Clark, the only native Texan to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, is a 1922 graduate of the Law School. He served on the Supreme Court from 1949 through 1967, an era particularly rich with cases defining the civil rights and civil liberties of the nation's citizens. Justice Clark's collection of personal papers from these years has been described by legal historians as one of the most complete for a Supreme Court justice of this era. The papers arrived on the UT campus not long after Clark’s death in 1977, but they were not officially opened to researchers until March 19, 1985.
The digitized content from the Clark papers will be the basis of an online resource called "Civil Liberties and Civil Rights Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court: the Papers of Justice Tom C. Clark." This resource will allow people from around the world to use the Clark files to research seminal cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, Sweatt v. Painter, Mapp v. Ohio and many others. This grant should enable the library to significantly increase access to the Clark papers and attract attention to the other outstanding collections of the library.
Tobe Liebert, director of special projects at the Tarlton Law Library in the Jamail Center for Legal Research, was responsible for writing the successful grant application. Liebert and Michael Widener, the head of special collections and curator of the Clark papers at the Library, will supervise the digitization project that is scheduled for completion in the summer of 2004.
The Knowledge Gateway is an evolving effort to make the resources of the University more widely available to the public by creating a Web-based entry point to the many collections and resources available on campus. The Knowledge Gateway website is located at http://gateway.utexas.edu.