An alumnus of the Kansas University School of Law and his wife have donated $1 million toward library holdings at the school.

The gift from Dallas residents Douglas D. Wheat and his wife, Laura, will provide an endowment for the law library to purchase materials in such areas as cyberspace, technology and legal history.

In honor of the donation, the library, in Green Hall, will be renamed the Wheat Law Library.

KU’s law library has more than 370,000 volumes, making it the largest in the state.

The holdings include the papers of Paul Wilson, who represented Kansas in the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, the “bogus laws” enacted by the pro-slavery territorial legislature that met in 1855 and every statute ever passed by the Kansas Legislature.

Doug Wheat graduated from KU with a degree in business in 1972, and received his law degree in 1974. He is president and co-founder of Haas Wheat and Partners, a Dallas-based private investment firm with partial ownership of Playtex and textbook wholesaler Nebraska Book Co.

He is on the steering committee for “KU First,” the $500 million capital campaign under way at the KU Endowment Association. He also is chairman of the KU First Law Campaign Committee.

Laura Wheat, who earned a law degree from the University of Maryland, practiced corporate law for eight years before becoming a full-time mother to the couple’s four children.