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Rebecca Tushnet

American law professor

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ16886233 ↗
Source-derived summary

Rebecca Tushnet (born April 4, 1973) is an American legal scholar. She serves as the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School. Her scholarship focuses on copyright, trademark, First Amendment, and false advertising.

In addition to her general scholarship, Tushnet is known for her fanfiction-related scholarship and her legal advocacy work for the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit fandom-related project that supports fanworks (such as fanfiction) through preservation and advocacy.

Biography

Education

Tushnet was a policy debater at Harvard, getting to finals of the National Debate Tournament in 1992 and 1995, she received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1995, and earned her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998.

Career

Tushnet served as a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and later for Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court. She practiced at Debevoise & Plimpton. Tushnet then entered teaching, first at NYU School of Law (2002–04), then at Georgetown University Law Center (2004–16), and most recently at Harvard Law School. In practice, Tushnet has represented fans in copyright and trademark disputes with rightsholders.

Personal life

Her father is Mark Tushnet and her mother is Elizabeth Alexander, who directs the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Rebecca Tushnet” is american law professor. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rebecca, Tushnet and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1973, 1992, 1995, 1998—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1973-04-04. For this dossier, Rebecca, Tushnet and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american law professor” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16886233. VIAF identifies the subject as 305279602. The Library of Congress control number is no2013097051. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1992, 1995 and 1998.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Rebecca Tushnet”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Rebecca Tushnet primary sources, Rebecca Tushnet archive and Rebecca research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Rebecca Tushnet”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Rebecca Tushnet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.