Rate My Professor Thomas Gallanis

Gallanis specializes in trust, succession, property, and fiduciary law, with particular interest in their comparative and cross-border aspects, and is a prize-winning scholar of English and European legal history. He teaches Property and Trusts and Estates. He is co-author of treatises including Wills, Trusts, and Estates (6th ed., with Kurtz and English) and The Law of Property (6th ed., with Hovenkamp and Kurtz), and casebooks such as Family Property Law: Cases and Materials on Wills, Trusts, and Estates (9th ed. 2024) and Fundamentals of Property Law (6th ed. 2025, with Burke and Burkhart). His scholarly articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals in the United States, England, France, China, and Japan; he co-authored The Oxford Edition of Blackstone: Commentaries on the Laws of England and is preparing a scholarly edition of the judicial notes of Sir Dudley Ryder for the Selden Society. An elected member of the International Academy of Estate and Trust Law, American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, and American Law Institute, he won the Selden Society’s David Yale Prize for his article on the history of evidence law in English courts. Gallanis serves on editorial boards of the Journal of Legal History, Continuity and Change, and Brill’s Studies in the History of Private Law. He leads law reform efforts as Executive Director of the Joint Editorial Board for Uniform Trust and Estate Acts, Reporter for the Uniform Powers of Appointment Act and Uniform Real Property Transfer on Death Act, and Associate Reporter for Restatement Third of Trusts. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago Law School, University of Michigan Law School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Georgia School of Law, All Souls College Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and delivered the Amakasu Lectures on Trust Law in Tokyo and the Tamisiea Lecture on Wealth Transfer Law at the University of Iowa.