Rate My Professor Thomas Gallanis

Thomas P. Gallanis holds the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University, where he joined the faculty in 2023. He also serves as Executive Director of the Global Wealth Management Project. Prior to George Mason, Gallanis was the Allan D. Vestal Chair in Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Iowa College of Law for six years. Previously, he held the Julius E. Davis Professorship of Law and position of Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the University of Minnesota Law School, as well as appointments as Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law from 2003 to 2007 and Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law from 1997 to 2003. Gallanis earned his JD from the University of Chicago Law School, LLM and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and BA from Yale University.

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.