Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett

Who was Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett?

Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett was a British legal historian who was the first ever chair of legal history at the London School of Economics.

Plucknett was born on 2 January 1897 in Bristol. Plucknett completed his early education at Alderman Newton's school in Leicester and then Bacup and Rawstenstall school in Newchurch, Lancaster. He completed his degree in history at London University and graduated with second class honours. He later completed his masters at University College London before his twenty-first birthday. He was also awarded the Alexander prize of the Royal Historical Society. For his masters Plucknett's speciality was the fifteenth-century council; he would later go on to write his PHD thesis on Statutes and their Interpretation in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century. He received his PHD from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and studied under the tutorship of H. D. Hazeltine.

With Plucknett's PHD came an LLB degree, which helped him get into Harvard Law School. Whilst studying at Harvard he took no courses, and instead only studied. He arrived at the school as a student in 1920 and by 1923 was an instructor. By 1926 he had graduated to an assistant professor; a position he held until 1931.