Dr. Rebecca Allensworth

Biography

Rebecca Haw Allensworth holds the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where she studies antitrust and professional licensing. Her scholarship on antitrust focuses on competition law, policy, and digital platforms. Additionally, her research on professional licensing explores how lawmakers balance expertise in the regulation of professions and the problems that arise from self-regulation. She is the author of "Licensing Racket: Decide Allowed Work and Goes Wrong," to be published by Harvard University Press in February 2025, which provides a deep dive into the pathologies of professional licensing in America. Her article on medical licensing boards and unethical prescribers, titled "Licensed 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 received the thirteenth annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for her groundbreaking antitrust scholarship. Professor Allensworth earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School and has served as an articles editor for the Harvard Law Review. She has also clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School. At Vanderbilt Law, she held the Tarkington Chair of Teaching Excellence from 2019 to 2022 and served as Associate Dean of Research from 2023 to 2025. Allensworth teaches Contracts and Antitrust Law, including an advanced course focused on Big Tech. She is a six-time winner of Vanderbilt’s Hall Hartman Outstanding Professor Award for excellence in teaching and was selected as the speaker for the Class of 2019 Commencement.

Research Interests