Danielle D’Onfro

Danielle D’Onfro is a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law, where she teaches Property, Advanced Private Law Seminar, and Corporations. Her research uses private law theory, history, and economics to study real property, debt, and emerging assets. She is a two-time recipient of the David M. Becker Professor of the Year Award (2022, 2026).

Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Washington Law Review, among other venues.

She is currently working on a series of papers about the role of private law in interpreting federal rights, including Constitutional Rights and General Private Law (with Daniel Epps), which argues that the private-law rights underlying federal constitutional provisions should be defined through general law principles rather than state positive law. A related project explores the legality of community benefit agreements and affordable housing set asides.

She is affiliated with the Center for Empirical Research in Law at WashU and CESifo in Munich, Germany.

Professor D’Onfro earned her B.A. magna cum laude in classics from Columbia College and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was a Student Fellow for the Program on the Foundations of Private Law. She clerked for Judge Allyson K. Duncan on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Before joining the faculty, she was a senior associate in the Debt Finance and Bankruptcy & Financial Restructuring Groups at WilmerHale.