Prof. Thomas Crocker

Thomas Crocker is a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of law where he teaches courses on Constitutional Law, Criminal Procedure, Free Speech and Democracy, National Security and the Constitution, as well as seminars in Jurisprudence and Law & Literature.

Professor Crocker graduated from Yale Law School, where he was Book Reviews Editor of the Yale Law Journal and an editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After graduating from law school, Professor Crocker clerked for Judge Carlos F. Lucero on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Prior to attending law school he completed a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Wales, and a B.A. summa cum laude from Mississippi State University, majoring in Economics and Philosophy. He also taught philosophy at St. Lawrence University in New York as a Visiting Assistant Professor before attending law school.

Professor Crocker has held fellowships as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA, and as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Germany at the Johann Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, where he was a resident fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities) and a participant in the Formation of Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in Summer 2013. Most recently, he was the MacCormick Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh School of Law from April 2015 through August 2015. In 2013, he was named a USC Breakthrough Star in recognition of the scholarly impact and potential of his work.

His recent scholarship focuses on issues of privacy, constitutional interpretation, and the nature of constitutional constraints. Recent articles appear in, among others, the UCLA, Texas, Washington University, Boston College, Fordham, and Connecticut Law Reviews as well as the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. He won the law school’s Outstanding Article Publication award three times. His article, “From Privacy to Liberty,” which appeared in the UCLA Law Review, was selected for presentation at the 2009 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholars Workshop held at Georgetown Law Center.

His current book project, Overcoming Necessity: Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism, is under contract with Yale University Press. This project in constitutional theory analyzes how the concept of necessity interacts with constitutional commitments to create dynamic challenges to constitutional governance, especially during times of emergency.