Thomas Cobb

Director of Legal Practice and Clinical Professor of Law

Education/Professional Certification

JD, University of Minnesota Law School
MA, University of Chicago
MA, Reed College
BA, University of Alabama

Biography

Thomas Cobb directs UConn’s Legal Practice program, the law school’s first-year lawyering skills sequence. His scholarly interests include judicial decision-making, law and rhetoric, statutory interpretation, and legal pedagogy. Professor Cobb studied literature, rhetoric, and art history as an undergraduate at Reed College and the University of Alabama. After earning a master’s degree in liberal studies from Reed, he received an IIE Fulbright grant to study and teach in France. He then attended graduate school at the University of Chicago to study comparative literature and earned his law degree, magna cum laude, at University of Minnesota Law School, completing a semester abroad at ESADE law school in Barcelona, Spain. After graduating, he clerked for Justice Susan M. Leeson at the Oregon Supreme Court and practiced law as an honors attorney in the Appellate Division of the Oregon Department of Justice.

Before joining the UConn faculty, Professor Cobb taught legal research and writing for 16 years at University of Washington School of Law. He taught a course on U.S. evidence law and the jury as a visitor at Université Jean Moulin, Lyon III, France. For the past five years, he directed and taught in the innovative legal research and writing program at Mitchell Hamline School of Law. Professor Cobb’s teaching also has included courses in evidence, legislation, immigration law, race and the law, constitutional law, and U.S. legal systems, as well as a course addressing state and local efforts to regulate the ride-share industry. Professor Cobb is a past co-editor of the Journal of Legal Education and served for five years as an associate editor of Legal Communication & Rhetoric: Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors. He currently serves on the Association of American Law School Diversity Committee.