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.

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.