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 2009-10 year, he will teach property and trusts and estates in the fall.
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 of Integrating Spaces: Cases and Materials on Property 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). 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. Since 2003 he has 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 law, empirical investigation of the probate process in the antebellum South, implied trust beneficiaries, antebellum libraries, and the idea of equality in early twentieth century black thought and its influence on the civil rights movement.
Brophy received his A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa), a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Columbia University, where he served as an editor of the Columbia Law Review.
Some of his recent publications are available at the social science research network.