James Toomey—an expert in health law, bioethics, elder law, and private law—joined the faculty in 2024. 

Toomey’s research applies philosophical and empirical methods to essential questions at the intersection of bioethics and private law theory, from whether genes can be owned to when the law ought to intervene in the decision-making of those with dementia. His work has been published in leading law reviews, including the Virginia Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Indiana Law Journal, and more, as well as peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Law and the Biosciences, the Biology & Philosophy, and American Journal of Bioethics – Empirical Bioethics. He is also a co-editor on a volume forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. 

Before joining the Iowa faculty, Toomey was Assistant Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in White Plains, New York, where he taught Property, Contracts, and Trusts & Estates, and won Haub Law’s 2023 Goettel Prize for Faculty Scholarship. Before that, he taught legal writing at Harvard Law School as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law. 

Toomey received his law degree from Harvard in 2019, graduating magna cum laude, where he won the Harvard Distinction in Teaching Award in 2018 for his work as a teaching assistant to Professor Michael Sandel.

Toomey earned his B.A. in English and Government at Cornell University in 2016, graduating summa cum laude and magna cum laude, respectively. He wrote honors theses in both majors, and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

From 2019-2020, Toomey completed a judicial clerkship for Judge Stanley Marcus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, and he has been admitted to the New York bar since 2020.

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