N. William Hines Chair in Law
Professor of History
BA, Yale University
JD, University of Chicago
LLM, PhD, Cambridge University
- Email thomas-gallanis@uiowa.edu
- Phone 319-335-9018
- Office 454 Boyd Law Building
- C.V. download PDF
- Video (Sutherland Lecture 2011) download .mp4
Professor Thomas P. Gallanis is a prize-winning legal historian and an expert on trust, probate, and fiduciary law. He teaches and writes in the fields of trusts and estates, estate and gift taxation, property, and English and European legal history. His scholarship has appeared in leading scholarly journals, such as the Cambridge Law Journal and the University of Chicago Law Review. Prior to teaching at Iowa, he was the Julius E. Davis Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Minnesota.
He received a B.A. summa cum laude with distinction in history from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he held a Bradley Fellowship in Legal History, and an LL.M. with first class honors in legal history and comparative law and a Ph.D. in legal history from Cambridge University. At Cambridge, he was a Benefactors’ Scholar of St. John’s College and was awarded the Hamson prize in comparative law, the Mansergh prize in history, and the Wright and Hughes prizes for academic excellence.
He has held a year-long Mellon Fellowship in Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has served as the Herbert Smith visiting professor in the law faculty of Cambridge University and as the Mason Ladd Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Iowa.
He is active in the field of trusts and estates and is a Fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. He is the author of Family Property Law: Cases and Materials on Wills, Trusts, and Estates (Foundation Press, 5th ed. 2011), one of the principal American casebooks in the field. He was invited to give the 2010 Shirley A. Webster Lecture in Wealth Transfer Law. His lecture, on “The New Direction of American Trust Law,” has been published by the Iowa Law Review.
He is an active participant in trusts and estates law reform. Elected to the American Law Institute, he serves as Associate Reporter for the Restatement (Third) of Trusts, as an adviser to the ALI Principles of the Law of Nonprofit Organizations, and as a member of the consultative group for the Restatement (Third) of Property: Wills and Other Donative Transfers. Within the Uniform Law Commission, he is the associate executive director of the Joint Editorial Board for Uniform Trust and Estate Acts, which is the official oversight body for all uniform law activity pertaining to trusts and estates. He is currently serving as the reporter (principal drafter) for a proposed Uniform Act on Powers of Appointment, and previously served as the reporter for the Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act, approved in 2009. He is also the co-chair of the Trust and Estate Uniform Laws Committee within the ABA Section on Real Property, Trust and Estate Law and an associate articles editor of the Section’s publication, Probate & Property. He is a past Chair of the Section on Trusts and Estates of the Association of American Law Schools. Before graduate study at Cambridge, he practiced with the trusts and estates group at Mayer, Brown & Platt (now Mayer Brown LLP) in Chicago and clerked for Judge David A. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
He serves as a consultant and expert in litigation and planning matters concerning wills, trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration.
He is also active as a legal historian, specializing in the history of English law. He was awarded the Selden Society’s David Yale Prize for his scholarly article on the rise of modern evidence law, which was judged “a distinguished contribution to the history of the laws and legal institutions of England and Wales.” He delivered the 2011 Donald W. Sutherland Lecture, on “The Evolution of the Common Law.” He has served as the Secretary of the American Society for Legal History and currently chairs the Society’s Finance Committee. He is a member of the editorial boards of the two leading journals in the field, Law and History Review (in the U.S.) and the Journal of Legal History (in England), and has been a reviewer for Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. At the University of Iowa, he organizes the interdisciplinary Program in Law and History.
