Thomas B. Nachbar

After earning his undergraduate degree in history and economics, Tom Nachbar spent five years as a systems analyst, working for both Andersen Consulting and Hughes Space and Communications before entering law school, where he served on the University of Chicago Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After graduation, he clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and later practiced with what is now Mayer Brown in Chicago as a member of the firm’s appellate litigation, information technology and intellectual property practice groups.

Nachbar’s research focuses on the constitutional dimensions of trade regulation. His early work addressed how the availability of new technologies challenged the divide between public and private alternatives to regulation; this work grew into a focus on the relationship between public and private control of markets as expressed in the federal antitrust laws. He has written extensively on the history of trade regulation, from mercantilist England through 20th-century America. His work ranges from study of common law, common-carriage obligations to the use of antitrust laws to regulate internet platforms and other multi-sided markets and the role of economic analysis in antitrust law. He has written several articles on the constitutional dimensions of antitrust law and trade regulation, the Supreme Court’s constitutional equal protection and due process jurisprudence, and, building on his background as a programmer and systems analyst, the legal implications of algorithms and artificial intelligence. He has both practiced and published in the field of telecommunications law (he authored, with Glen Robinson, the casebook “Communications Regulation”). In the spring of 2025, he will teach the course Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Nachbar also works in national security. He has written and taught on a wide variety of national security law topics, including the role of law in counterinsurgency, the law of detention and war crimes. He is a judge advocate in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he has, among other assignments, edited an Army handbook on the development of legal systems, trained Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and deployed to Iraq as a forward headquarters legal adviser. His current Reserve assignment is as associate dean of the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School. He is a senior fellow with the University’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and is affiliated with the Law School’s National Security Law Center and the National Security Policy Center at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. 

Scholarship Profile: How Should We Understand, Develop, and Allocate Regulatory Authority (Virginia Journal 2016)