Rebecca Haw Allensworth

Rebecca Haw Allensworth holds the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair in Law at Vanderbilt Law School, where she studies antitrust and professional licensing. Her antitrust scholarship focuses on competition law and policy for digital platforms. Her research on professional licensing explores how lawmakers should balance the need for expertise in regulating the professions with the problems that can arise from self-regulation. She is the author of The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work and Why It Goes Wrong (Harvard University Press, February 2025), a deep dive into the pathologies of professional licensing in America. Her article about medical licensing boards and unethical prescribers, “Licensed to Pill,” appeared in The New York Review of Books in July 2020. Her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and has received the thirteenth annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for groundbreaking antitrust scholarship.

Professor Allensworth earned her undergraduate degree from Yale and an M.Phil. from Cambridge University before earning her J.D. at Harvard Law School, where she served as articles editor of the Harvard Law Review. She was a law clerk to Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School. At Vanderbilt Law, she he held the Tarkington Chair of Teaching Excellence from 2019 to 2022 and served as Associate Dean for Research from 2023 to 2025.

Allensworth teaches Contracts, Antitrust Law, and an advanced antitrust 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 also selected by the Class of 2019 to be their Commencement speaker.