Zalman Rothschild’s research focuses on the First Amendment, anti-discrimination law, and law and religion. His scholarship has appeared in Cornell Law Review, the Journal of Law and Religion, Columbia Law Review Forum, Yale Law Journal Forum, and other academic publications, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. His writing for popular audiences has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, the Jewish Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Zalman served as a law clerk to Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and practiced law for several years as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss. During that time, Zalman was recognized by The American Lawyer in its “Litigator of the Week” profile for winning a Fourth Amendment appeal and securing the reversal of all convictions of his client (2021) and received the “On the Rise Top 40 Young Lawyer” award from the American Bar Association (2022). In 2023, the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools awarded Zalman the Harold Berman Award for Excellence in Scholarship. Currently, Zalman is a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Comparative Constitutional Law and Religion at the University of Lucerne, and an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.

Zalman holds a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, a PhD in Religion from New York University, an MA from Yeshiva University, and a BA from Binghamton University.