SCHOOL OF LAW

William E Forbath

Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law

JD Yale
PhD Yale
BA University of Cambridge
AB Harvard

Professor Forbath came to Texas in 1997 after more than a decade on the faculties of law and history at UCLA. Among the nation's leading legal and constitutional historians, he is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Harvard, 1991), the forthcoming Social and Economic Rights in the American Grain and Courting the State: Law in the Making of the Modern American State and about sixty articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory. His scholarly work appears in Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Journal of American History; his journalism in Politico.com, American Prospect and the Nation. His current research concerns the role of law in the creation of the modern American state, and social and economic rights in the courts and social movements of South Africa. Professor Forbath visited at Columbia Law School in 2001-02 and at Harvard Law School in 2008-09. He is on the Editorial Boards of Law & History, Law & Social Inquiry: Journal of the American Bar Foundation, and other journals, and on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History, Texas Low-Income Housing Services, and other public interest organizations.

Forbath's most recent published work is Social and Economic Rights in the American Grain in THE CONSTITUTION IN 2020 (Jack M. Balkin & Reva B. Siegel eds.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). It can be found here: http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/wforbath/papers/forbath_social_and_economic_rights.pdf