REBECCA HAW ALLENSWORTH is a professor at Vanderbilt Law School where she studies antitrust for tech platforms and professional licensing, focusing on the problem of self-regulation by state licensing boards. She is the author of Board to Death: Why Professional Licensing Isn’t Keeping You Safe, forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Her article about state medical boards and unethical prescribers, “Licensed to Pill,” appeared in The New York Review of Books in July 2020. Her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and she has advised three presidential administrations about professional licensing policy.

Professor Allensworth earned her undergraduate degree from Yale and an M.Phil. from Cambridge University before earning her J.D. at Harvard Law School, where she served as articles editor of the Harvard Law Review. She served as law clerk to Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit before coming to Vanderbilt, where she held the Tarkington Chair of Teaching Excellence before her appointment to a David Daniels Allen Chair in Law in 2022. She assumed the role of associate dean for research in January 2023. She is a five-time winner of the Hall Hartman Outstanding Professor Award for excellence in teaching.