In Memoriam
Thomas D. Rowe, Jr.
Tom Rowe
1964 Yale graduation
Tom Rowe ’64 died on July 11, 2026 at his home in Marina del Rey, CA. The cause was apparently a sudden heart attack. His wife, Susan French, survives him.
Tom graduated from Yale in 1964, tied for first in his class. After Yale he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving his M.Phil. in 1967. He then studied law at Harvard Law School, receiving his J.D. in 1970.
He commenced his professional career as a law clerk for Associate Justice Potter Stewart in the Supreme Court of the United States. He joined the Duke University law faculty in 1975, served as associate dean from 1981 to 1984, and was senior associate dean in 1995-1996. He also taught at Georgetown, Michigan, Virginia, UCLA, and Pepperdine. On leaves from Duke he served with the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, worked as an attorney with a private firm in Los Angeles, and was a visiting scholar at the RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice. He published extensively in the fields of civil procedure, complex litigation, judicial remedies, and constitutional law.
Here are two essays that Tom wrote on the occasions of our last two Yale reunions.
Essay, 60th Reunion Book
by Tom Rowe
May 2024
Tom Rowe
2019
My wife Susan French and I enjoy living in Marina del Rey, near Santa Monica Bay. We finished our law-teaching careers a decade ago but keep doing a bit of legal writing.
Despite mobility problems we do a fair bit of traveling — cruises and road trips. We visit Susan’s daughter and our thriving grandchildren in Seattle. We had twelve very good years with our 43-foot sailboat — Susan the skipper and I the first mate — before selling it in 2020. One year we sailed to Cabo San Lucas and then sailed from La Paz, Baja California Sur, up into the Sea of Cortez. Much of our social life is centered around the nearby California Yacht Club and friends we have made there.
I send my best to all.
Essay, 50th Reunion Book
by Tom Rowe
May 2014
Freud had it only two-thirds right when he said, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” As others have suggested, there’s also play.
I found fairly far along in life, my late fifties, what has proved to be an enduring love with my wife since 2001, Susan French, like me a retired law professor (she from UCLA, I from Duke). We share a joy that many classmates no doubt also find most fulfilling as we age, grandparenting: in our case Susan’s granddaughter Ellie, born in December 2011. She keeps us fascinated and delighted, and racking up frequent-flier miles as we visit her and her parents in Seattle from our home in Los Angeles.
I’ve also been fortunate in being able to continue satisfying work in partial retirement. Being a retired academic is not a bad racket. Susan and I both teach part time at the UCLA School of Law, and we work on new editions of teaching books. I continue other academic writing, and we keep going to professional meetings that interest us.
And being at least partially retired, we have a good deal of time for the play side, leisure pursuits that we both enjoy, including food and wine, sailing, and travel. I’m the household sommelier, and Susan is skipper of our 43’ sailboat Bateau Frowe (after the combination of our last names, French and Rowe). We enjoy cruises in Southern California waters and have taken the Bateau as far as Cabo San Lucas and La Paz in Baja California Sur, plus bareboat chartering in places like New Zealand and Tahiti.
We’re fortunate to be in good health and plan to keep enjoying travels as long as we can. We’ve recently been finding some most interesting commercial cruises, to places like Alaska, Turkey and the Aegean, the lower Danube (a region that has produced more history than can be consumed locally), the Galapagos, the Baltic, and Norwegian fjords. One of these years, Antarctica.