David Dante Troutt

About Me

David Dante Troutt is a native New Yorker, raised on the border of Sugar Hill, Harlem and Washington Heights and currently living in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.  Troutt has been writing creatively most of his life, authoring a few unpublished volumes of poetry, three unpublished novels and a variety of non-fiction and journalistic works.  A proud father, husband, writer, scholar and activist on a range of issues, Troutt’s work often embodies themes involving cities, racial identity, the quest for equity and the redemptive psychology of everyday life.

A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, Troutt pursued various law and advocacy-related efforts in both inner-city poverty as well as intellectual property before joining the Rutgers Law School (Newark) faculty in 1995.  In 1998, he joined his literary identity with his legal and political interests in the publication of a thematic collection of short stories, The Monkey Suit – and other short fiction on African Americans and justice (The New Press).  In 2006, he edited the collection of essays entitled, After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (The New Press) and authored the lead essay, “Many Thousands Gone, Again.”  The next year, he published his first novel, The Importance of Being Dangerous, a literary thriller.  Meanwhile, Troutt actively writes political essays and analysis for a variety of national periodicals and websites, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, the Crisis, the DailyVoice.com and the Washington Independent.com. He is currently professor of law and Justice John J. Francis Scholar at Rutgers Law School-Newark.

For a fuller list of David’s notable academic publications, please see the “Articles” tab of this site.

In his own words, David Dante Troutt on the motivations behind his writing:

Books:

The Monkey Suit began as a failed novel I wrote during law school at Harvard.  I was surprised by the sense of alienation I experienced from the case method as a first-year student and yearned for more historical context and a fuller exploration of characters missing in the court opinions.  Fiction, as usual, rescued me from feeling too adrift.  I was fortunate that my desire to marry a fictional re-telling of some of the key cases we were reading in class coincided with the rise of storytelling scholarship in Critical Race Theory.  With the supervision of my thesis advisor and mentor, Professor Charles Ogletree, and the example of another mentor, Professor Derrick Bell, I researched and wrote the first three stories involving three important cases.  Eventually, I wrote the remaining seven stories and was privileged to publish with The New Press.

The Importance of Being Dangerous, my first published novel, was originally entitled The Trouble Without You. Although I never thought of myself as a writer of thrillers, the story of Sidarra’s grief, professional desperation and loss of control found its way to thrills.  The route was racial fantasy.  That is, Sidarra (like Griff and to a lesser extent Yakoob) occupies a certain outward mild-mannered, middle-class status that never seems to challenge the system.  We see white characters break out of this mold throughout American storytelling, but rarely black.  The idea of breaking free by breaking rules is, therefore, pretty central in our culture.  But there has to be some moral justification for it.  I imagined that black folks in Sidarra and Griff’s position would be drawn to the idea of racial revenge—at least the economic kind—particularly when they’re witnessing the gentrification of their community (Harlem) by professional whites.  This is the sense of racial fantasy.  But it’s also redemption fantasy, because Sidarra is trying ultimately to get better, to overcome her pain and integrate her life with her daughter.  Like all fantasy, however, it must meet with reality, even harsh reality, which is how the story—which I had instead imagined as a love story—became a thriller.

After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina was the outgrowth of outrage as well as my decades of work as an urbanist scholar and activist.  The original motivation for a book was my concern that the story of Katrina as a singular event in American history would be told primarily by the usual pundits, few of them people of color, and that the constructive power of honest inquiry would be lost to the fear and evasion characteristic of colorblindness.  Indeed, even President George W. Bush had called it the occasion for frank discussions of race and class in America.  This book would seek to ensure some of that through the capable contributions of genuinely thoughtful and brilliant scholars—who happened to be black.  In practically no time at all, we were able to get magnificent essays on a range of very important, often overlooked subjects relating to the storm, the underlying history, the role of rights, the availability of remedies and paths to recovery for both the region and the nation.  Again, we were very fortunate to work with The New Press, which helped us to complete publication in time for the first anniversary.  This proved critical as the feared “Katrina fatigue” began to set in and foreclose continued national discussions of the issues still affecting the survivors.  However, I remain touched by and indebted to the people of New Orleans for the great many things I learned about them, their rich culture and, by extension, the structure and substance of American cities since the founding of the republic.

Academic Writing

As my abbreviated publications list indicates, I write in a couple of different areas—metropolitan equity, intellectual property and critical theory/social justice.  Much of my work seeks to find the possibility of equity in blind spots.  This is obviously true in matters concerning persistent urban poverty and the history and structure of racialized space in America.  However, race and the dogged inequities that accompany that construct historically may be critical to analyses of many areas of intellectual property rules.   My publications list is annotated, and readers are free to contact me for information about additional texts.  Below I provide a research agenda of upcoming projects.

My current two-year research agenda involves two prongs: in intellectual property, the normative squaring of recent legal trends in propertization with cultural blind spots and in metropolitan equity, further exploration of law reform efforts under the guise of equitable regionalism.  What binds the two subject areas, as usual, are my interests in cultural context and equity.  I’ll discuss each in turn.

Recent legal trends in intellectual property law are characterized by a tension between technological changes that greatly reduce the cost of creation on the one hand and access and expansion of ownership rights that are protected by courts on the other.  The resolution of this conflict necessarily invites a variety of normative approaches, which may differ across different areas of intellectual property (e.g., copyright is different from trademark) as well as within areas of creativity (e.g., literature is different from music).  My last article examined the expansion of trademark rights against the possibility of human commodification.  That is, I posited that trademark’s expansion has approached a federal right of publicity by which, in the extreme, a human persona may soon be registered with the PTO.  The article was a challenge to the normative debate around this, specifically the philosophical question about whether this amounts to commodification of the persona and whether that is somehow justifiable.  Race was introduced as a forgotten cultural construct whose presence complicates the terms of the normative rationale (i.e., what is worse, diminished prospects for abstract “human flourishing” or submission to stereotype?).

The next article continues that discussion in the music copyright context, asking whether a digital commons in which musicians forego traditional copyright ownership in favor of user-based schemes satisfies the increased desire to own one’s own music that is illustrated recently by many black popular artists.  Here race is used to reframe the historical context for music copyrights and thereby re-examine the effective rationales for current reform proposals.  Discounted in much scholarship is the systematic exploitation of black music and musicians from the blues through rock and roll.  However, that history is reflected in a desire to own shared by many musicians today, who believe they are at the economic mercy of corporate interests.  This article attempts to square the normative interests at stake between more individual ownership and the technological reality of a digital commons.  I plan to follow this article with more work on the question of which normative principles to use, specifically comparing how industry practices in different areas of copyright may yield different resolutions.

(I am also conducting research on false advertising, an area of law where more attention is due, in order to challenge the lack of regulation concerning exploitative lifestyle ads.)

In metropolitan equity, I am preparing  to write a book on American cities that will provide a broad prescriptive commentary on poverty, residential organization and the most productive forms of equitable regionalism.  As an urbanist who’s authored over a half dozen scholarly articles on the law and structure of cities as well as two research publications on California cities, I am committed to finding constructive ways to reduce urban poverty and its hardships while increasing equity beyond the city’s boundaries.  Previous work has chronicled the history and current structure of racial and economic disparities, summarized in my theory of antimarkets and metamarkets.  More recent work has focused on the continuing role of segregation in our laws on residential organization.  Localism (the local government theory of municipal autonomy), I have demonstrated, has succeeded legal segregation to the detriment of both central cities and an increasing number of suburbs.  It should be modified by “equitable regionalism,” my theory of law reform under which localist rules give way to a sharing of burdens along the most economically contentious issues (e.g., tax revenue, school financing and district boundaries).  How it works and how it effects transformation must be shown in different regions of the country.  I have already begun my research and modeling on this long-term project in Newark, New Orleans, Miami and Oakland, California.  Thus far the empirical evidence clearly shows greater economic interdependency among municipalities and that regional fragmentation produces sprawl, waste and poverty.  The challenge for law reform and state fiscal policy is how to more fairly and efficiently distribute public goods and services.  Uniting environmental and smart growth concerns with civil rights and economic justice, equitable regionalism has the potential to demonstrate that what benefits the metropolitan poor often benefits the middle class.

Dr. Bobbye Vary Troutt