Dan Farbman joined Boston College Law School in 2017. He teaches classes on constitutional law, local government law, movement lawyering, inequality, and legal realism. His research focuses on the legal history of radical reform movements in public law from both an institutional perspective and the perspective of the practice of cause lawyering. For three years prior to joining BC Law, he was a Climenko Fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School.
Farbman’s work has been published in the California Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Fordham Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law and Humanities. He is currently working on a collective history of abolitionist lawyers and lawyering in the United States between 1820-1865.
After graduating from Amherst College in 2001, Farbman spent a few years in New York City trying (and failing) to make it as a professional actor before he enrolled at Harvard Law School. After graduating law school in 2007, he was a clerk for Judge Margaret Morrow on the Central District of California in Los Angeles before beginning a Skadden Fellowship at Advancement Project in Washington, D.C. In this role, he worked with community organizers around the country on grassroots efforts to fight racial injustice in public education, with a particular focus on the school to prison pipeline. After leaving practice, Farbman pursued a Ph.D. in American studies at Harvard University.
