David Blankfein-Tabachnick
Associate Professor of Law; Associate Dean for Faculty and Intellectual Life | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Professor Blankfein-Tabachnick is a scholar of the private law, taxation, and tax policy.
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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.
Areas of Expertise (3)
Intellectual Property
Law Philosophy
Law & Economics
Accomplishments (1)
Michigan State University Teacher-Scholar Award (professional)
2021
Education (4)
Yale Law School: M.S.L. 2008
University of Virginia: Ph.D., Legal and Political Philosophy 2007
University of Rochester: M.A. 1995
Ithaca College: B.A. 1993
Links (1)
Event Appearances (2)
“Maximizing Intellectual Property: Optimality, Synchronicity and Distributive Justice”
Spring 2021 | 2020 Obligations Conference
“Methods in Legal Academia”
September 2019 | Michigan State Law Review Membership
Journal Articles (3)
On Rawlsian Contractualism and the Private Law
Virginia Law Review2022 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.
Maximizing Intellectual Property: Optimality, Synchronicity, and Distributive Justice
St. John's Law Review2020 This Article addresses the distributive structure of intellectual property and innovation policy and the foundational role it plays in distributive justice. Distributive accounts of law are undergoing a renaissance; an unprecedented paradigm shift away from the wealth-maximizing approach to law and legal theory and toward a distributive view. In line with this shift, this Article breaks new ground in providing a needed framework for a distributive theory of intellectual property law and innovation policy and articulates an appealing, egalitarian alternative to wealth- or welfare-maximizing accounts of intellectual property and innovation policy. In doing so, this Article diagnoses and serves as a corrective to a seemingly systematic omission in the mature scholarly literature surrounding intellectual property.
Kaplow and Shavell and the Priority of Income Taxation and Transfer
Hastings Law Journal2017 This Article rejects a central claim of taxation and private law theory, namely, Kaplow and Shavell’s prominent thesis that egalitarian social goals are most efficiently achieved through income taxation and transfer, as opposed to egalitarian alterations in private law rules. Kaplow and Shavell compare the efficiency of rules of tort to rules of tax and transfer in meeting egalitarian goals, concluding that taxation and transfer is always more efficient than other private law legal rules. We argue that Kaplow and Shavell reach this conclusion only through inattention to the body of private law that informs the very basis of their discussion: underlying property entitlements. This Article contends that Kaplow and Shavell’s comparison of rules of taxation to rules of tort fails to take proper account of the powerful role that (re)assigning underlying property entitlements plays in achieving egalitarian goals, even at the level of formal theory.
