David Blankfein-Tabachnick

David Blankfein-Tabachnick

Associate Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life

Law College Building
648 N. Shaw Lane Rm 366
East Lansing, MI 48824-1300
517-432-6885
dbt@law.msu.edu

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.

An accomplished lecturer and popular teacher, he was honored with a university-wide award recognizing excellence in teaching from the University of Virginia. Then in 2021, he became the first MSU College of Law faculty member to receive the prestigious university-wide Michigan State All-University Teacher-Scholar Award.

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.

An active and dedicated faculty-community member, he has served on faculty appointments and diversity committees. He has served as the College of Law Representative to the University Council and University Senate. He served on the 2020-2021 College of Law Dean Search Committee. He has repeatedly served as Chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee in 2020-2021, 2021-2022 and as its Co-Chair for 2023-2024. He is a member of the Law College’s Intellectual Property, Information and Communications Law Program faculty.

Both a descendant of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and a fifth-generation New Yorker, he has a personal interest in Jewish culture’s contributions to political liberalism, the arts, finance, and the learned professions. When the Law College is out of session, he lives in New York City.

Professor Blankfein-Tabachnick holds a Ph.D. in legal and political philosophy from the University of Virginia and a degree in law from Yale.

His work was recently profiled in the Law College’s alumni magazine’s Faculty Voices, in the Law College’s 2021 Memorable Moments and in the Law College’s News.


Download Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

M.S.L. Yale Law School
Ph.D. University of Virginia
M.A. University of Rochester
B.A. Ithaca College