Professor Thomas P. Gallanis

Professor Thomas P. Gallanis is Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University.  He is also Visiting Professor (2017-2027) at the University of Chicago Law School and a chair visiting professor at the KoGuan Law School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

He received his BA summa cum laude in history from Yale, his J.D. from the University of Chicago, where he was a Bradley fellow in legal history, and his LL.M. and Ph.D. from Cambridge.

He is an expert on trust, succession, property, and fiduciary law. He is also a prize-winning legal historian with expertise in English and European legal history.

He is an elected member of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law, the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and the American Law Institute.

He has been a visiting fellow of All Souls College in Oxford, a Mellon fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Herbert Smith Freehills visitor in the law faculty of Cambridge University.

He is the executive director of the Uniform Law Commission’s Joint Editorial Board for Uniform Trust and Estate Acts, which oversees all uniform laws in the fields of trusts and succession. Within the American Law Institute, he served as associate reporter for the Restatement Third of Trusts and currently serves as an adviser to the Restatement Fourth of Property.

His scholarly articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals in the United States, England, France, China, and Japan as well as in U.S. law reviews.

He is co-author of treatises on Wills, Trusts, and Estates (6th ed., with Kurtz and English) and The Law of Property (6th ed., with Kurtz and English) and The Law of Property (6th ed., with Hovenkamp and Kurtz). 

Among his current book projects is an edition of the judicial notes of Sir Dudley Ryder, to be published by the Selden Society.