After 25 years at McKinney, Tom Wilson isn’t done teaching

Last month, the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law celebrated the retirement of Professor Lloyd T. Wilson Jr., better known as Tom Wilson, who’s served McKinney students since 1999.

His retirement is being celebrated by friends and peers who’ve worked alongside Wilson over the course of his career, including Indiana Court of Appeals Senior Judge Edward W. Najam Jr., who Wilson was partners with in the firm Najam & Wilson.

“Sharing a devotion to the law, the life of the mind, and an affinity for hard work, we became legal brothers in arms,” Najam said. “It has been my privilege to know Tom as a close and steadfast friend and colleague for approaching five decades.”

Although his teaching has focused more prominently on contract and real estate law, Wilson has always had a strong passion for international studies, contributing his legal knowledge and experience to McKinney programs and classrooms around the world.

His eagerness to learn from other legal cultures and teach the American system can perhaps best be summed up in the following story he shared with The Indiana Lawyer.

“Every fall break I’ve taught in Barcelona, and every spring break in Bergen, Norway. So, I’m in Norway, and they’re giving me a present as I’m leaving, a book, and it was called “Comparing Legal Cultures.” I open it up, I looked at the table of contents, and I go, ‘OK, you’ve got nine or 10 European countries and China. Where’s the U.S.?’ And they essentially said, ‘It’ll be there when you write it.’ So I wrote the chapter on the U.S. legal culture.”

In reflecting on his “serendipitous” career, Wilson points not to his achievements but to the role others have played in his life, allowing him to take step after step across states and continents to where he is now.

“I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my career, and none of that good fortune came without a lot of other people, and I have extraordinary gratitude for everyone who was part of my occupational journey and personal journey leading to the retirement,” he said. “None of that would have been possible without a lot of support from friends and colleagues and students.”

Wilson looks back on the many stages of his career and what he’s looking forward to next in a conversation with The Lawyer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Where does your interest in both teaching and practicing law stem from?

My interest in teaching is something I can remember from grade school. As I went up through high school and college, I was anticipating a career as an English professor, and I went to grad school at Duke to get the necessary degrees. And after I got my master’s degree, it became apparent that the timing wasn’t good economically in the country for social sciences and literature programs. There were a lot of cuts going on, so I thought, “What do I do with an undergraduate and graduate degrees in English? Go to law school.”

In the early 90s, I was practicing in Bloomington, and I was on a board of directors for the local food bank with a professor at the Kelley School of Business. I used that relationship to say, “Hey, do you ever hire adjunct professors? I would really like to try my hand at teaching law.” And to my surprise, they said yes.

So it began with going from a wannabe English professor to practicing lawyer, to practicing lawyer as an adjunct, to making the leap to a full-time teaching career at McKinney. And once I got my foot in the door, I stayed until now.

Did your teaching style differ between the Kelley School of Business and the McKinney School of Law?

The future lawyers, this was their entire world, and they already had undergrad degrees and had chosen this as a profession and were in it with both feet. The business students, I had mostly undergraduates, but I did have a couple graduate-level courses, too, and the undergraduates had not chosen law as a career. Their interest was business, but you can’t conduct business outside of the atmosphere of law.

Some of the business students changed their mind and ended up going off to law school, not solely because of me, but I think that course exposed them to something.

Is there a class from law school that still sticks with you?

It was my first-year contracts class, and it wasn’t because I had any particular interest in the topic. It was as good as all the others. But the professor was dynamic and made you want to be curious.

People come to law school, and especially come to classes like contracts, and they think, “Oh, this is going to be just a bunch of rules.” What you find out is [that] every law issue is a human issue, and humans are complicated people.

How does your interest in comparative legal analysis fit into your work teaching contract law?

Always in the background was this interest in international and comparative stuff. Following my first two semesters in law school, I saw an ad in the Indiana Daily Student newspaper, back when it was still printed. And in the back of the paper, it had an ad that the German cultural department was offering scholarships for a summer program, and I thought my chances are one in a million. But I applied and they selected me. I spent the summer of 1980 in what was a divided Germany. It really excited me to be exposed to things that were so different. And you read about them in the newspaper. You see it on TV. It’s an entirely different world to be there in person.

How have your experiences teaching across the world informed your understanding and teaching of the legal system here in the United States?

One of the lines that I use for my one-off lectures around the world is that looking out is a wonderful way to look in. What I mean by that is, if I’m going someplace overseas and my job is to explain to somebody who is not culturally conditioned, I have to think really deeply about my system, and I have to know something about their system, so that I can make it relate to them. I encourage them to look out, interact with other legal cultures, and they’ll be more aware if they do that of the other culture. But they’ll also become more aware of their own.

It also gives some degree of humility in teaching our system to our students that this is not the only way this can get done, and in the increasingly global world, you can’t assume that everyone’s going to approach the issue the same way you are.

What’s next for you, post-retirement?

I have been approved to join the Fulbright [Specialist Program] roster. The Fulbright has several different programs, and some of them are intended to be a full academic year long. This one is designed to attract people who are unable or unwilling to commit to a full year abroad.

I would like to see myself teaching one course for one semester each year. I plan on continuing to teach in Barcelona and Bergen [Norway] in the fall and spring. Those are for a week each, but now I will have more time. I won’t be restricted to one week for spring break and one week for fall break, and so, my current relationships will now possibly be able to expand.•