Biography

David S. Tanenhaus is an internationally recognized authority on the history and practice of juvenile justice. 

He is a professor in the UNLV history department and the James E. Rogers Professor of History and Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law. From 2004 to 2012, Tanenhaus served as editor of Law and History Review. 

Since coming to UNLV in 1997, he has taught courses on American legal and constitutional history, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, children and society, juvenile law, and introductory surveys of U.S. History. He also teaches a course on the history and theory of jurisprudence for the Judicial Studies program at the University of Nevada, Reno.

He has written extensively about legal and constitutional history. His books include Juvenile Justice in the Making (Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Constitutional Rights of Children: In re Gault and Juvenile Justice (University Press of Kansas, 2011). He has co-edited many books including A Century of Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago, 2002) with Margaret K. Rosenheim, Franklin E. Zimring, and Bernardine Dohrn; and Choosing the Future for American Juvenile Justice (NYU Press, 2014) with Franklin E. Zimring. He also served as the editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (MacMillan Reference USA, 2008). 

A passionate believer in connecting universities to communities, he has served as a Trustee of Nevada Humanities, participated in teacher institutes sponsored by the Center for Civic Education and the American Institute for History Education, and helped found and coordinate both the Philip Pro Lectureship in Legal History at the Boyd School of Law and the UNLV Constitution Day Public Lectureship.