David M Rabban

Biography

Professor Rabban served as counsel to the American Association of University Professors for several years before joining the Texas faculty in 1983.  He served as General Counsel of the AAUP from 1998 to 2006 and Chair of its Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2006 to 2012.  His teaching and research focus on free speech, higher education and the law, and American legal history.  He is best known for his path-breaking work on free speech in American history.  He is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge,1997), which received the Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for "the best book in intellectual history published in 1997."  His many articles have appeared in Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and elsewhere.  He was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2016 and of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2016-17.  His most recent book is Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History.