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David Dante Troutt

Professor of Law and Justice John J. Francis Scholar

David Dante Troutt joined the Rutgers Law School-Newark faculty in 1995. As a lawyer who graduated Harvard Law School in 1991, Professor Troutt practiced both public interest and corporate law, advocating on a broad range of areas including inner-city economic development, intellectual property, and commercial litigation. He writes in two primary areas — metropolitan equity and race as well as intellectual property and culture — often combining law and other disciplines. His law review scholarship includes, among other works, “A Portrait of the Trademark as a Black Man: Intellectual Property, Commodification, and Redescription,” 38 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1141 (2005); “Ghettoes Made Easy: The Metamarket/Antimarket Dichotomy and the Legal Challenges of Inner-City Development,” 35 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (2000); “Screws, Koons, and Routine Aberrations: The Use of Fictional Narratives in Federal Police Brutality Prosecutions,” 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 18 (April 1999).

Professor Troutt is also the author or/and editor of several books: The Monkey Suit — and Other Short Fiction on African Americans and Justice (The New Press, 1998), a collection of stories chronicling the imagined experiences of African Americans involved in actual legal controversies from 1830 to the present; After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (The New Press, 2006) (including an essay, “Many Thousands Gone, Again”); and The Importance of Being Dangerous, a novel (HarperCollins, 2007). In addition to publications analyzing poverty in California cities and New Orleans, Professor Troutt’s non-fiction work includes regular columns about race, law, and society in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals as well as chapters in a variety of anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Shawn and daughters Naima and Jasmine.