Tobias B. Wolff, Member, Board of Directors

Tobias Barrington Wolff is emerging as one of the leading lights among the new generation of public-law scholars. He has been a professor at the University of California, Davis Law School since 2000 and was a visiting professor at Stanford Law School in the 2003-04 year, at Northwestern Law School in fall 2005, and at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in fall 2006.

His academic work spans the fields of Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law, and his advocacy work has included participation in some of the highest profile gay rights cases of the last several years.

Professor Wolff's work in Constitutional Law includes a substantial focus on issues of racial justice and the history of race relations in America. He published "The Thirteenth Amendment and Slavery in the Global Economy" in 2002, an article that analyzes the application of antislavery principles to the modern forced labor practices of multinational corporations and has already been recognized as one of the most important contributions to Thirteenth Amendment scholarship in recent years.

His ongoing work in this field includes research projects on abolition and foreign slavery practices following the Civil War, and the history of lynching in the United States and its relationship to the Reconstruction Amendments and the Eighth Amendment. In 2005, he published "The Pimple on Adonis's Nose: A Dialogue on the Concept of Merit in the Affirmative Action Debate" with his co-author and father, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff.

Professor Wolff's constitutional scholarship also focuses on free speech values and the First Amendment. He is one of the nation's leading authorities on the U.S. military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and has published the definitive works on the First Amendment implications of that policy - "Political Representation and Accountability Under Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and "Compelled Affirmations, Free Speech, and the U.S. Military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy."

He has also done substantial work in the field of Civil Procedure and Conflict of Laws, with a co-authored casebook, articles on "Preclusion in Class Action Litigation" and "Interest Analysis in Interjurisdictional Marriage Disputes," and a forthcoming article on "The Class Action Fairness Act and the New Paradox of Federal Aggregation Policy."

In the spring of 2003, Professor Wolff was chosen as the commencement speaker for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall School of Law at his home institution, U.C. Davis. He is a frequent commentator on constitutional law issues in general and gay and lesbian issues in particular, and his advocacy work has included participation in cases filed in Hawai'i, Alaska and California seeking equal rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Before entering academia, Professor Wolff was a litigator at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York and a judicial clerk for the Honorable Betty Binns Fletcher and the Honorable William A. Norris, both of the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. He is a proud native of New York City and, despite six years in California, still crosses streets like an inveterate New Yorker.

Updated July 7, 2006