Professor Gallanis and His Scholarship Mentioned in Oral Argument

Professor Thomas P. Gallanis and a recent law review article of his were mentioned during oral argument on April 15 in the Iowa Supreme Court. The case was In re Ezra L. Totton Scholarship.

Professor Gallanis is the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law and the Executive Director of the Global Wealth Management Program at Scalia Law. He is an expert on the law governing trusts, succession, property, and nonprofit organizations.

The case of In re Ezra L. Totton Scholarship involves a scholarship created in 1997 for students majoring in the physical sciences at the University of Iowa, but the scholarship contains a racial restriction. The university applied to modify the terms of the gift to remove the racial restriction. Representing the university in the Iowa Supreme Court was the Solicitor General of Iowa, Eric Wessan.

To bolster the university’s argument for modification of the terms of the gift, Solicitor General Wessan mentioned a recent law review article by Professor Gallanis: “Is Racial Discrimination Ever Charitable?”, published in 2025 in the University of Illinois Law Review Online. In the article, Professor Gallanis makes the case that racial discrimination by a charity is against public policy, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services.

The video of the oral argument is here. Solicitor General Wessan mentions Professor Gallanis and his law review article at time-stamp 51:20.