Danielle D’Onfro

Danielle D’Onfro is an Associate Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law where she teaches Property, Advanced Private Law, Corporations, and Corporate Compliance. Her research applies private law theory to business associations and their capital structure. Her writing about debt contracts covers both consumer and commercial debt. Her article, Limited Liability Property, analyzes the property claims inherent to secured debt and the obligations that come with those claims. In Corporate Stewardship, she proposes a decentralized individual liability regime to improve the efficiency of corporate compliance. In Corporations as Commodities, she uses property theory to study the controversy about the purpose of the corporation. Error-Resilient Consumer Contracts, explores how structural changes to consumer contracts could reduce the frequency of firm-side breach. Her current project, The New Bailments, applies common-law property doctrine to intangibles. Her popular writing has appeared in theWashington Post, SCOTUSBlog, and Take Care.

Professor D’Onfro earned her B.A. in classics from Columbia College and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. In law school, she was a Student Fellow for the Program on the Foundations of Private Law. After law school, 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 in Washington, DC and Boston, Massachusetts.