David Blankfein-Tabachnick

Associate Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

Professor Blankfein-Tabachnick is an expert on Bankruptcy, Intellectual Property, Contracts, Taxation, Tax Policy, Torts, Trusts, Estates

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Michigan State University

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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.

Areas of Expertise

Trusts and Estates
Tax Policy
Contracts
Intellectual Property
Law Philosophy
Law & Economics
Bankruptcy
Taxation
Torts

Accomplishments

Michigan State University Teacher-Scholar Award

2021

Education

Yale Law School

M.S.L.

2008

University of Virginia

Ph.D.

Legal and Political Philosophy

2007

University of Rochester

M.A.

1995

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Event Appearances

“Maximizing Intellectual Property: Optimality, Synchronicity and Distributive Justice”

Spring 2021 | 2020 Obligations Conference  

“Methods in Legal Academia”

September 2019 | Michigan State Law Review Membership  

Private Law Workshop

Spring 2023 | Harvard Law School  

Journal Articles

On Rawlsian Contractualism and the Private Law

Virginia Law Review

2022

Shifts in academic paradigms are rare. Still, it was not long ago that the values taken to govern the private law were thought to be distinct from the values governing taxation and transfer. This was thought to be true, although for different reasons, in both philosophical and economic accounts of private law. The question was, for example, whether the law of contract and tort is properly governed by the values of autonomy and corrective justice or by distributive concerns instead. The conventional, indeed, the nearly universal view of Rawlsianism—the overwhelmingly dominant theory of liberalism and distributive justice—was that the private law lies beyond the scope of Rawls’s two principles of justice.

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On Rawlsian Contractualism and the Private Law

Virginia Law Review | 2022

For decades, the prevailing view held that Rawls’s principles of justice applied only to public institutions like taxation and transfer, leaving private law outside the reach of distributive justice. On Rawlsian Contractualism and the Private Law, published in the Virginia Law Review, articulates a paradigm shifting alternative. David Blankfein-Tabachnick and Kevin A. Kordana have been central in challenging this orthodoxy, arguing that private law must, for Rawls, be subject to distributive principles and exposing flaws in both philosophical and economic arguments for the exclusion. Their view has been, overwhelmingly, vindicated as leading scholars—including Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, Samuel Freeman, and Gregory Keating—have joined the growing consensus that private law, for Rawls, must be understood as part of the basic structure, governed by Rawls’s two principles of justice.

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Maximizing Intellectual Property

St. John's Law Review | 2021

Maximizing Intellectual Property: Optimality, Synchronicity, and Distributive Justice critiques existing IP scholarship for neglecting the distributive implications of legal rules like taxation and bankruptcy, arguing that maximizing principles require synchronizing IP doctrine with all entitlement-governing rules to optimize innovation. The piece demonstrates that internal doctrinal boundaries (e.g., copyright/patent divides) and institutional designs (e.g., prizes vs. monopolies) must align with a chosen external distributive principle, as IP value depends on interactions with tax rates, bankruptcy rules, and other "background" legal structures. The analysis concludes that efficiency in innovation policy demands abandoning compartmentalized IP frameworks in favor of optimization calibrated to governing principles.

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