David Sklansky teaches and writes about criminal law, criminal procedure, and evidence.  His scholarship has addressed the law, sociology, and political science of policing; the relationship between criminal justice and democracy; the proper exercise and constraint of prosecutorial power; the interpretation and application of the Fourth Amendment; fairness and accuracy in criminal adjudication; the relationship between criminal justice and immigration laws; the history of the hearsay rule and its connection with American slavery; ideas about violence in criminal law; and the role of race, gender, and sexual orientation in law enforcement.  He is faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and a member of the American Law Institute.  In 2017 he received the law school’s John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Before joining the faculty of Stanford Law School in 2014, Sklansky taught at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.  He won campus-wide teaching awards at both those institutions. Earlier he practiced labor law in Washington D.C. and served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles.