David is an American legal scholar whose career focused on the development of the Law and Society (L&S) and Law and Development (L&D) fields. He is the Voss-Bascom Professor of Law and Dean of International Studies Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, while holding roles as a Senior Global Fellow at FGV Direito SP in São Paulo and an affiliated senior fellow at Harvard Law School. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from UW-Madison and his LL.B. from Yale Law School.
In Law and Development, his contributions began in the 1960s as a legal advisor for the USAID Mission to Brazil. His 1974 Yale Law Journal article, “Scholars in Self-Estrangement,” co-authored with Marc Galanter, provided a critique of early liberal legal export models, prompting a shift toward empirical approaches tailored to local institutional contexts in the Global South. His later books, The New Law and Economic Development (2006) and Law and the New Developmental State (2013), tracked the evolution of legal frameworks in emerging markets.
In Law and Society, he helped institutionalize empirical legal research. At UW-Madison, he directed the Disputes Processing Research Program, which studied civil litigation patterns. He also participated in the Critical Legal Studies movement, examining the relationship between legal ideology and social inequality, and worked to build international networks connecting Global South scholars with global socio-legal organizations.