David Sklansky teaches and writes about policing, prosecution, criminal law and the law of evidence. His newest book, “Criminal Justice in Divided America: Police, Punishment, and the Future of Our Democracy,” was published in 2025 by Harvard University Press. Sklansky 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 a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles.