Alfred L. Brophy
Before entering teaching in 1994, Al Brophy was a law clerk to Judge John Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals (Fourth Circuit), practiced law with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in New York, and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University. He joined the UNC faculty in 2008, from the University of Alabama School of Law, where he taught for many years. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Boston College, the University of Hawaii, Indiana University, and Vanderbilt University. Brophy teaches in the fields of property, trusts and estates, and remedies. During the 2010-11 year, he will teach property in the fall and trusts and estates in the spring.
Alfred Brophy has written extensively on race and property law in colonial, antebellum and early Twentieth Century America. His books are Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Reparations Pro and Con (Oxford University Press, 2006). He is the lead co-author with Alberto Lopez and Kali Murray of Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race, forthcoming in 2010 from Aspen, and co-editor with Daniel W. Hamilton of Transformations in American Legal History (Harvard 2009) and Transformations in American Legal History--Law, Ideology, and Methods, Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz, volume II (forthcoming Harvard 2010) and co-editor with Sally Hadden of the Blackwell Companion to American Legal History (forthcoming 2011). He has also published extensively in law reviews, including the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Journal of Legal Education, North Carolina Law Review, University of Colorado Law Review, and the Texas Law Review. He gave a distinguished lecture (''Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law'') in 2008 at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge Law School, which was published in the McGeorge Law Review. In March 2010 he delivered the Hutchins Lecture to the Center for the Study of the American South, on constitutional ideas in literary addresses at UNC before the Civil War. It will appear in 2011 in the North Carolina Law Review. From 2003 to 2010 he served as book reviews editor of Law and History Review.
Brophy is completing a book on antebellum jurisprudence, tentatively titled University, Court, and Slave. His other current research is on the intersection of property and equity, monument and cemetery law, empirical investigation of the probate process in the South before the Civil War, implied trust beneficiaries, and the idea of equality in early twentieth century black thought and its influence on the civil rights movement.
Some of his recent publications are available at the social science research network.