Thomas W. Swan, Professor of Law and Dean, 1916-27

Thomas W. Swan

REFERENCES:

Laura Kalman, Legal Realism at Yale 1927-1960 (1986).

Eugene V. Rostow, “Thomas W. Swan 1877-1975,” 85 Yale L. J. 159 (1975).

Thomas Walter Swan (1877-1975) graduated from Yale College in 1900 and attended Harvard Law School, where he was Editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review. He was brought to the Law School as Dean in 1916 from private practice in Chicago and a lectureship at the University of Chicago Law School. The subjects of Dean Swan’s research and teaching were bankruptcy and corporations.  He remained the School’s dean for slightly over a decade, until his appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. 

Professors Arthur Corbin and Wesley Hohfeld were instrumental in Dean Swan’s appointment. Chairing a search committee, they believed that to attract a quality faculty the dean had to have been a graduate of Yale College, to have had experience in practice and to have studied the case method (a pedagogical approach that at the time was associated with Harvard, was considered progressive, and the adoption of which was vigorously opposed by Simeon Baldwin). Swan met all of their criteria, and Corbin went to Chicago to recruit him.  Swan shared Corbin and Hohfeld’s goal of modernizing legal education, which has been described as bringing “sociological jurisprudence” to Yale. As Swan’s first Dean’s Report put it, “law must be studied as a science,” and  “greater attention [paid] to the solution of the many legal-political problems which the changes in our economic and social life are creating.”

Although Dean Swan’s career on the bench was far longer than his time at the Law School, being an active jurist through his service as Chief Judge of the court from 1951-53, he was as instrumental as Simeon Baldwin was decades earlier in the formative years of the Law School’s history and is considered one of the School’s great deans. He recruited important scholars through senior appointments and the appointment of young graduates, including, in the business law area, Karl Llewellyn, Roscoe Steffen, Wesley Sturges, Edward Thurston and William Vance, dramatically improved the quality of the student body, and presided over two innovations that distinguished the school from its competitors, limiting enrollment and introducing honors research courses (although with Corbin, Dean Swan did not support those initiatives). At the end of his deanship, Yale had become a national, competitive law school and was considered “jurisprudentially progressive.” As Dean Eugene Rostow put it in a tribute, “the modern Yale Law School came of age under his leadership.”

At the Law School, a scholarship fund was established in his honor in 1958, a student loan fund in 1947, and a library fund in 1942.