Boston College Law School
885 Centre Street
Newton, MA 02459
Email: thomas.carey@bc.edu
Amicus Brief Clinic
Tom Carey '65 is an attorney in private practice who specializes in appeals, state or federal, civil or criminal. Carey has had a long association with 51 Law as a student, faculty member, and active alumnus. He has been on the Adjunct Faculty since 1990, teaching Appellate Advocacy and the Amicus Brief Clinic and working with various advocacy and moot court programs. In 2016, the 51 Law School Alumni Association gave him its Special Service Award.
After an undergraduate AB in government at 51, Carey took his LLB (J.D.) from Boston College Law School in 1965, receiving a number of academic honors, including Order of the Coif and the Publications Trust Award, “presented occasionally to honor student writing of outstanding quality and scholarship.” He also holds an LLM degree from Harvard Law School. Following clerkships in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts with Judge Andrew A. Caffrey and Judge Frank J. Murray, Carey spent a decade on the law faculties at Suffolk and Boston College Law Schools, teaching a wide variety of courses and working with the advocacy programs. He coached 51 national championship teams in the National Moot Court Competition and the National Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition.
Thereafter, in government service from 1976 to 1979, he was the Appellate Attorney for the Major Violators Division of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, responsible for all of the Division’s many briefs on appeal in the Supreme Judicial Court and the Appeals Court. Since then, in private practice as a solo practitioner and as an attorney affiliated with Dwyer & Collora and the Boston office of Hogan Lovells, he has successfully handled numerous civil and criminal appeals involving many different substantive fields of law.
Carey is passionate about service to others, not only as an advocate for his clients, but as a teacher and mentor, an author, a civic volunteer in his hometown of Hingham, and in bar association activities. He co-authored Armstrong & Carey, Massachusetts Appellate Practice (LexisNexis 2022 Ed.), and serves on the Massachusetts Law Review’s Editorial Board. In 2021, he received the prestigious Massachusetts Bar Association President’s Award “for his selfless dedication, leadership, and service to the MBA and the Massachusetts legal community.”