William Forbath
Home Department: Law
Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law
JD 1983, Yale
PhD 1992, Yale
BA 1976, University of Cambridge
AB 1974, 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 (Harvard, 2007), 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 American Prospect and the Nation. His current research concerns the history of U.S. immigration law and policies and the role of law in the creation of the modern American state. Professor Forbath visited at Columbia Law School in 2001-02 and will be teaching 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.