FACULTY VOICES: DAVID BLANKFEIN-TABACHNICK

Professor David Blankfein-Tabachnick joined the MSU Law faculty in 2014, where he creates a wholly unique classroom experience for his students: rigorous, energetic, and positive. His students often say that his classes are among the highlights of the law school experience.

His nationally recognized scholarship focuses on structural economic (in)equality and wealth creation, primarily through the lenses of private law and taxation.

Intellectually speaking, I was born at just the right time. When I began writing, the rich literature at the intersection of taxation, the private law and economic (in)equality was just coming into being and superb private law scholars around the globe were debating their subject’s foundations and structure. The legal academy was ablaze in electrifying debate and discussion.

My scholarly work focus on taxation and private law subjects. I aim to articulate a distributive account of the private law, addressing a gap in the scholarly literature. When I started, the conventional philosophical wisdom in this arena was that the traditional bodies of private law, e.g., tort, property, and contract, bear a conceptual independence from one’s commitment to economic or distributive justice. Concerns over distributive justice, the thinking went, were the proper domain of taxation and transfer – and there they reign supreme.

Economists, too, believed, but, for very different reasons, that taxation and the private law are best kept separated. The seemingly spell-binding idea was that egalitarian “intrusions” into the private law – whether a mandatory minimum wage or a common law doctrine of unconscionability – unduly hamper wealth maximization and creation. Such scholars concluded, perhaps counterintuitively, that any measure of social welfare provided by egalitarian private law doctrine can always be more efficiently realized through the system of income taxation and transfer.

Beginning in 2003, through a series of scholarly articles in leading law reviews and peer edited journals, I have tried to show that there is a “property” or “entitlement-oriented” flaw in these arguments. I have argued that important theories of distributive justice cannot coherently be understood to swing clear of the entitlement-governing aspects of the private law, as the conventional view holds. At the same time, I work to show that the law and economics approach – giving nearly absolute priority to income taxation and transfer over private law rules – problematically assumes an underlying system of property ownership; thereby, avoiding the question of the very form such property rules or entitlements ought to take. This notable omission, I believe, calls into question the plausibility of the argument’s conclusion.

The sustained scholarly interest in this body of work has been astonishing. There is now wide and growing skepticism toward the “conventional” view and the idea that there is a property or entitlement-oriented flaw in the law and economics approach to these issues has gained academic currency. I am thrilled at the array of brilliant scholars – law professors, economists, and philosophers – that have entered the discussion and debate.

My scholarly work informs my teaching at the Law College. I bring rigor, intellectual energy, and enthusiasm to my Property, Basic Income Tax, Trusts and Estates and Tax Policy courses. As faculty advisor to the Michigan State Law Review, I aspire to instill an enthusiasm for ideas, while raising the journal’s academic profile and national ranking.

This year, I was honored to be the Law College’s first faculty member to receive MSU’s prestigious university-wide All University Teacher-Scholar Award. I am grateful, beyond words, for the extraordinary support of my faculty-colleagues, my students, and the College of Law alumni. It means the world to me.