Morris Seligman Dees Jr. (born December 16, 1936) is an American attorney known as the co-founder and former chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), based in Montgomery, Alabama.

[3]: 132–33  Dees and his colleagues at the SPLC have been "credited with devising innovative ways to cripple hate groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan, particularly by using "damage litigation".

[13] In his 1991 autobiography[3]: 84–85  Dees wrote that in 1962, as a young lawyer, he had represented Ku Klux Klan member Claude Henley, who faced federal charges for attacking Freedom Riders in an incident documented by a Life magazine photographer.

In 1969, Dees sued the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Montgomery, Alabama, at the request of African-American civil rights activist Mary Louise Smith.

The trial court ruled that the YMCA effectively had a "municipal charter" by this agreement with the city, and was therefore bound by the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Civil Rights Act) to desegregate its facilities.

[17] Dees was one of the principal architects of a strategy that used civil lawsuits to secure a court judgment for monetary damages against an organization for a wrongful act.

Dees's most famous cases have involved landmark damage awards that have driven several[vague] prominent neo-Nazi groups into bankruptcy, effectively causing them to disband.

[4] In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser ran a series alleging that Dees discriminated against the SPLC's black employees, some of whom "felt threatened and banded together".

[25] These comments were made after a controversy pitting Dees against much of the civil rights community in his support of the nomination of Edward E. Carnes to be a federal appeals court judge.

Before the firing, two dozen employees had complained to management about concerns of "mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism" which threatened SPLC's moral authority and integrity.

[30] The Montgomery Advertiser reported that a letter which described such a plot was sent by Hal Turner, a radio talk show host, a paid FBI informant and a white supremacist, on July 29, 2007, after the SPLC filed a lawsuit against the Imperial Klans of America (IKA) in Meade County, Kentucky.

[46] The TV movie titled Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story (1991) dramatized his campaigns against white supremacist hate groups.