Correspondence, family papers, court files, academic files, speeches and writings, and other papers documenting Rutledge's career as professor and dean of the State University of Iowa College of Law (1935-1939), associate justice for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (1939-1943), and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1943-1949). Court files include intracourt memoranda, working drafts of opinions, case memoranda and certiorari, summaries of lawyers' opinions, and conference proceedings.

Topics include freedom of speech, church and state, searches and seizures, right to counsel, self-incrimination, the scope of military authority and the inviolability of constitutional principles, the internment of Japanese Americans at the start of World War II, wartime review of New Deal agencies, the war crimes trial of Japanese General Tomobumi Yamashita, the role of the judiciary in a regulated economy, child labor laws, legal education, and corporate business in American life.

Organizations represented include the American Bar Association, Association of American Law Schools, Iowa State Bar Association, and National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Family correspondents include Rutledge's father, Wiley Blount Rutledge, Sr., his half-brothers, Dwight and Ivan C. Rutledge, and his brother-in-law, Seymour Howe Person. Other correspondents include Clay R. Apple, Victor Brudney, Huber O. Croft, Arthur J. Freund, A. B. Frey, Ralph Follen Fuchs, Bernard Campbell Gavit, Guy M. Gillette, Henry Joseph Haskell, Mason Ladd, Jacob M. Lashly, Edna Lindgreen, W. Howard Mann, George W. Norris, Joseph R. O'Meara, Jr., John C. Pryor, Luther Ely Smith, Robert L. Stearns, Tyrrell Williams, Carl Wheaton. Willard Wirtz, and Richard F. Wolfson. Judges represented in the correspondence include Henry White Edgerton, Lawrence D. Groner, Justin Miller, and Harold M. Stephens of the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court justices Hugo LaFayette Black, Harold H. Burton, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Houghwout Jackson, Frank Murphy, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Fred M. Vinson.