Bio
I’m an Associate Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law. I write in the areas of federal courts, conflict of laws, complex litigation, and civil procedure. I teach constitutional law, civil procedure, and federal courts. I previously taught at the University of Missouri School of Law and the NYU School of Law, the latter as a Furman Academic Fellow. I went to NYU for law school and Swarthmore for college.
Before teaching law, I was a litigator in private practice in Washington, D.C., a law clerk, a baseball writer, and a high-school teacher. My writing has appeared in everything from the flagship law reviews of Cornell, Notre Dame, and Minnesota to ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, and obscure list servs. I like playing with data, getting serious with words, and being out there trying something.
Everyone calls me Tommy.
Papers
Breaking Kayfabe, 89 Mo. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming)
Argues that Supreme Court judicial rhetoric rarely but notably ascribes doctrinal change to changes in the Court’s composition, and offers a qualified defense of this practice.
The Wages of Hitching Wagons, 112 Ky. L.J. 661 (2024) (invited symposium essay)
Argues that the practice of lockstepping state law to federal law can introduce instability in state law if federal law is also unstable.
There Is No Such Thing as Circuit Law, 107 Minn. L. Rev. 1681 (2023)
Argues that federal intermediate appellate courts do not make, find, or apply their own substantive bodies of federal law and explores how the belief that they do has led to mischief across many different areas of law.
State Rejection of Federal Law, 97 Notre Dame L. Rev. 761 (2022)
Argues that state judges, legislators, and electorates respond to federal judicial opinions not only by borrowing them into state law but also in many cases by explicitly rejecting them, creating space for state policy experimentation but also upsetting the policy balance struck by federal case law.
The Paradox of Exclusive State-Court Jurisdiction Over Federal Claims, 105 Minn. L. Rev. 1211 (2021)
Argues that recent changes in the law of individual Article III standing interact with state law to produce a paradox: many federal claims can be brought only in state court, and only in some states, leading to substantial litigation costs and the uneven development of federal law.
TransUnion v. Ramirez, 141 S. Ct. 2190, 2224 n.9 (2021) (Thomas, J., dissenting).
Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP Excellence in Research Award.
Divide and Concur: Separate Opinions and Legal Change, 103 Cornell L. Rev. 817 (2018) (with B. Friedman, A. Martin & S. Smelcer)
Uses a novel empirical database of Supreme Court concurring opinions created for the article and a global comparative study of separate judicial opinions to argue that separate opinions signal, invite, and catalyze legal change.
American Academy of Appellate Lawyers’ Eisenberg Prize for the best article on appellate practice and procedure.
The Canon at the Water’s Edge, 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 207 (2012)
Argues that the presumption against extraterritorial application of statutes has been strengthened as its justification shifted away from promoting international comity and toward ostensibly empirical assumptions about how Congress legislates.
Paul D. Kaufman Memorial Award for the outstanding note in the Law Review.
Projects
Open-Access Civil Procedure Casebook
This is a free, online casebook for an introductory course in United States federal civil procedure. It also includes a typical supplement that reproduces the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure along with relevant statutes and the U.S. Constitution.
I compiled, wrote, and coded the project myself, with helpful tips from several years’ worth of clever first-year students. In the near future, I will post the entire project on GitHub. This will allow others to fork the project for their own use. It will also enable changes from one version to the next to be seen clearly online.
The primary motivation for this project was to mitigate the extremely high costs of casebooks in American law schools. You can see a beta version of the casebook here.
Supreme Court Case Lineup Tool
This is a web app that will display the breakdown of justice-level voting in a given Supreme Court case (1791–2015) given the U.S. Reports citation. You can access the web app here.
R Ipsa Loquitur
This software package enables easy access to publicly available APIs and datasets that provide insight into American judicial behavior. It is a package for R, and I recommend using it with Positron or RStudio. I also plan to create a user-friendly web interface further down the development roadmap.
This project is a work in progress and still in an early stage. You can find the GitHub repository here.
CV
You can find a copy of my curriculum vitae here.