John Wesley Hamman v. U.S. - Record, 1955

The Papers of Armistead M. Dobie span the years 1902 to 1963, with the bulk of the material covering 1939 to 1956, the years of Dobie's judgeship. The first three boxes contain general correspondence, which is primarily of biographical interest, although there are some items, especially the 1939 letters from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Senators Carter Glass and Harry Byrd, that have historical value. The correspondence with Judges John J. Parker and Morris A. Soper in the general files, as well as in the court materials, yield very little information about the cases the three were considering. Other correspondents who wrote Dobie one or two letters of interest were Felix Frankfurter, Stanley Reed, Roscoe Pound, Samuel Williston, Manton Davis, and many former University classmates and students. The general correspondence files were kept alphabetically by correspondent's name or, occasionally, by subject, and within the alphabetical division the correspondence is arranged chronologically. Following the correspondence are four notebooks of mimeographed "textbooks" from Dobie's graduate studies at Harvard and teaching at Virginia in the 1920s.

Boxes four and five contain drafts of speeches arranged alphabetically by title or subject. Boxes six through fifteen contain court materials that include records, briefs, and correspondence for a small percentage of the cases Dobie heard. There are few notes and drafts or copies of the opinions he wrote. There are several folders on the Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward for both the 1951 and 1955 hearings; also of interest is Judge Waties Waring's dissenting opinion on Davis' "sister" case, Briggs v. Elliott. The cases are arranged chronologically, and are followed by a box containing the dockets for the Fourth Circuit from 1948 to 1956.

Box fifteen also contains notebooks regarding the work of the U.S. Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure, and of a committee studying the jury system.