Thomas Crocker is a Professor of Law at Boston College Law School where he teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law and theory, criminal procedure, and legal ethics.
His book, Overcoming Necessity: Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism (Yale University Press, 2020), received the 2020 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize, which is awarded for exemplary works of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. Overcoming Necessity analyzes how the concept of necessity interacts with constitutional commitments to create dynamic challenges to constitutional governance, especially during times of emergency. The project is motivated by a debate that emerged in the post-9/11 literature about the nature and function of constitutions and constitutionalism in relation to claims that emergencies make necessary, and can thus justify, extralegal government action. This debate relied on an unexamined initial premise that claims about necessity play a special justificatory role, and that these necessity claims were at best in tension with constitutions and constitutionalism and at worst in direct conflict. Overcoming Necessity examines this premise and argues that American constitutionalism has a rich tradition of addressing, and overcoming, claims about necessity.
His scholarship extends from considering how to address executive power in emergency situations, to how criminal procedure implicates not only privacy but also free speech and citizenship, to how to approach questions of constitutional interpretation, to how constitutional rights become deeply rooted. This work has appeared in, among others, the Northwestern, UCLA, Texas, Washington University, Indiana, Boston College, BYU, Fordham, and Connecticut law reviews as well as the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. He has also published in peer-reviewed journals such as Legal Theory and Constellations. His article, “From Privacy to Liberty: The Fourth Amendment after Lawrence,” which appeared in the UCLA Law Review, was selected for presentation at the Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholars Workshop. He has also written for The Atlantic, Slate, and The New Republic, among others, addressing topics that range from the democratic implications of a right to security in relation gun regulation, to the implications of changes in the Court’s composition for adherence to precedent that protects liberty, and to the prospect of enriching democracy through statehood for native tribes.
Crocker has held several visiting fellowships. He was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA, where he was also a Fellow at the Harvard Humanities Center. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Germany at the Johann Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, where he was also a resident fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg and a fellow in the Formation of Normative Orders Excellence Cluster. He returned to Germany under a DAAD Senior Research Fellow Grant for additional research the Normative Orders Excellence Cluster in 2019. He has also been a MacCormick Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh School of Law and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
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. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Wales.
He served as a clerk for Judge Carlos F. Lucero on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Prior to his tenure at Boston College, he previously taught as a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law and as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at St. Lawrence University in New York.
