ASIL: Program Committee, 1961

These professional and personal papers that reflect Dillard’s career as law professor and dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, as a scholar, and as judge to the International Court of Justice. There are University related files especially concerning the honor system; case materials for McClanahan v. California Spray-Chemical Corporation, case he argued before the Virginia Supreme Court; his work in the International Court of Justice and other local organizations and some personal notes related to school segregation. The collection has many photographs and memorabilia.

The papers in Mss 84-8 were donated in nine installments. The earliest records were bound volumes of notes Dillard took as a law student (1925-27; 1930-31) and worked from as a beginning teacher. He gave the bound volumes to the library in 1963, along with the case files for Almond v. Day, on which he worked during the early sixties.

The deposit transferred by Dillard's wife Valgerdur N. Dillard after his death fell into three groupings. The oldest were subject files (ca. 1930-1960) comprised of personal and professional correspondence, teaching materials, and law practice files. Next were another set of subject files, identical in nature to the first, but maintained primarily while Dillard was dean from 1963 to 1969. Finally, there were the correspondence files, already mentioned, which Dillard kept himself, and some of his Court files which were in labelled folders.

To avoid confusion the two sets of subject files have been integrated into one alphabetical group, Series I. Researchers should keep in mind that the large run of personal correspondence (80 folders, 1925-81) contains information about his professional life, to a limited extent from the early years and markedly so from the later ones. Since this loose definition of personal correspondence was established by Dillard and his secretaries at the Law School, it was followed for the later, unfiled correspondence. No new subject files were created. Consequently, in the later personal correspondence files one can expect to find, for example, letters to and from Phillip Jessup on matters of international law or the American Society of International Law.

The speeches and writings were isolated and arranged alphabetically by title or subject. The folders contain whatever related material was found with the piece. These files, comprising Series II, are especially revealing of the way Dillard worked. He was a popular teacher and speaker whose anecdotes and paradigms seemed to flow spontaneously, but his papers show this was not entirely the case, for his lectures and speeches were always carefully designed and organized. He loved words, beautifully written sentences, and well-formed ideas. Articles, speeches, opinions, and even some letters went through many drafts handwritten in pencil on legal pads. A frequent annotator with a lovely, fluid long-hand, he read most things with a pencil or pen in his hand.