Vanderbilt University Law School
Daniel J. Sharfstein
Assistant Professor of Law
Voice: 615-322-1890
Fax: 615-322-6631
Email: daniel.sharfstein@vanderbilt.edu
Office: Room 252
View curriculum vitae (.pdf)
Links
Area(s) of Expertise
American legal history, property law
Research Interest(s)
American legal history, race and the law, property law
Education
J.D. Yale Law School
A.B. Harvard College
Biography
Dan Sharfstein’s scholarship focuses on the legal history of race in the United States. His current book project, Sun and Shade: Three American Families Journey from Black to White, will be released in 2010 by Penguin Press. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Economist, American Prospect, Legal Affairs and Africa Report. For his research on the color line in the American South, Professor Sharfstein was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and was the inaugural recipient of the Raoul Berger Visiting Fellowship in Legal History at Harvard Law School. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he clerked for the Honorable Dorothy W. Nelson, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Honorable Rya W. Zobel, United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He was also an associate at Strumwasser & Woocher, a public interest law firm in Santa Monica, California. Prior to law school, he spent three years working as a journalist in West Africa and Southern California. Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty in fall 2007, he was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.
Representative Publications
Books
Sun and Shade: Three American Families Journey from Black to White, Penguin Press (forthcoming 2010)
Articles
"Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the Emergence of the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860," 91 Minnesota Law Review 592 (2007)
"Saving the Race," Legal Affairs (March-April 2005)
"Passing Fancy," Legal Affairs (September-October 2003)
The Secret History of Race in the United States, 112 Yale Law Journal 1473 (2003)
"European Courts, American Rights: Extradition and Prison Conditions," 67 Brooklyn Law Review 719 (2002)
"Human Rights Beyond the War on Terrorism: Extradition Defenses Based on Prison Conditions in the United States," 42 Santa Clara Law Review 1137 (2002)
"No Cure for a Broken Heart: Davis v. District of Columbia," 158 F.3d 1342 (D.C. Cir. 1998), 108 Yale Law Journal 2451 (1999) (Case Note)
Some links on this page require the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
