David Blankfein-Tabachnick

Biography

Professor Blankfein-Tabachnick is a scholar of the private law, taxation, and tax policy. His work has addressed bankruptcy, contract, property and intellectual property, taxation, and criminal and tort law. His publications appear in selective law reviews and peer edited journals including the California Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, George Washington Law Review, Michigan Law Review, repeatedly in the Virginia Law Review and the Cambridge University Press journal, Social Philosophy and Policy. ... His scholarship has been the subject of engagement in leading law reviews, peer-edited journals, and academic monographs. His work has been reprinted in several anthologies, including Rawls and Law. He has been invited to discuss his ideas throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States. His latest work on contractualism and the private law appears in the Virginia Law Review.

Professor Blankfein-Tabachnick joined the Law College faculty in 2014 and was awarded tenure in 2020. He was appointed Associate Dean for Research in the summer of 2023 and promoted to Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life in the winter of 2023. He served as Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Michigan in the spring of 2023, has been a visiting scholar at the Yale Law School, and a visiting faculty member at Penn State Law and Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a recurring visiting professor at Peking University School of Transnational Law where he is a member of the founding faculty.

Professor Blankfein-Tabachnick has notable law journal leadership experience. In 2017, he was appointed Faculty Advisor to the Michigan State Law Review. Since his appointment, the journal has risen nearly fifty places in the W&L ranking of flagship American law reviews. Under his leadership, the journal has instituted its Visionary Scholar Article Series and the Law Review Symposium-Faculty Workshop Series. Additionally, he co-created and innovated the widely referenced 2006 Virginia Law Review symposium, Contemporary Political Theory and the Private Law.

He has taught courses on bankruptcy, copyrights, contracts, criminal law, federal income tax, intellectual property, international relations, legal and political theory, property, property II, remedies, tax policy, torts, and trusts and estates.