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Zalman Rothschild holds a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School and a PhD in Religion from New York University. Previously, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, a law clerk to Judge Jane Roth on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss. During his time in practice, Professor Rothschild was recognized by The American Lawyer in its "Litigator of the Week" profile and received the "On the Rise—Top 40 Young Lawyer" award from the American Bar Association.
Professor Rothschild’s research focuses on the First Amendment, anti-discrimination law, and law and religion. His scholarship has appeared in Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review Forum, and Yale Law Journal Forum, among other places, and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. He also writes for broader audiences, with essays in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and the Washington Post. He has testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on religion and public schools and is a 2026–27 Fellow at the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. In 2023 and 2026, the Law and Religion Section of the Association of American Law Schools awarded Professor Rothschild the Harold Berman Award for Excellence in Scholarship.
Featured Scholarship:
Vaccines, Religious Liberty, and the GVR as Doctrinal Signal
139 Harv. L. Rev. F. 285 (2026)
113 Georgetown Law Journal 1456 (2025)
The Impossibility of Religious Equality
125 Colum. L. Rev. 453 (2025)
107 Cornell L. Rev. 1067 (2022)
Individualized Exemptions, Vaccine Mandates, and the New Free Exercise Clause
131 Yale L.J.F. 1106 (2022)
Sovereignty, Reason, and Will: Carl Schmitt and Hasidic Legal Thought
Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2022
Free Exercise's Outer Boundary: The Case of Hasidic Education
119 Colum. L. Rev. F. 200 (2019)