Daniel J. Sharfstein

Daniel J. Sharfstein is a professor of law and history at Vanderbilt University and a legal scholar who has written books and articles about the legal history of the United States and African Americans as well as Oliver Otis Howard and the war against Nez Perce. He was a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.

He graduated from Harvard College and then worked for 3 years as a journalist. He received his Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, clerked for judge Dorothy W. Nelson at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for judge Rya W. Zobel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He was an associate at Strumwasser & Woocher, a public interest law firm in Santa Monica, California.

In 2021 he was researching a book on New York's garment workers.

Selected bibliography Winner of the Association of American Law Schools 2011 Scholarly Papers Competition.

Sharfstein DJ. "Reading American Anarchy as a Legal History of Immigrants: Forum on Willrich’s American Anarchy" Law and History Review. 2025;43(1):189-194.