After earning his undergraduate degree in history and economics, Tom Nachbar spent five years as a systems analyst, working for both Andersen Consulting and Hughes Space and Communications before entering law school, where he served on the University of Chicago Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. After graduation, he clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and later practiced with what is now Mayer Brown in Chicago as a member of the firm’s appellate litigation, information technology and intellectual property practice groups.

Nachbar’s research focuses on the nature of regulation: how the law is used (and by whom) to shape and control behavior. His early work addressed how the availability of new technologies alters conceptions of regulation. His current work is on the relationship between public and private regulation. Throughout, his work has retained a focus on the regulation of markets and networks. He has written extensively on the history of trade regulation, from mercantilist England through 20th-century America, with an emphasis on the constitutional dimensions of trade regulation. His work on network regulation ranges from study of common law, common-carriage obligations to regulation of the Internet. He has both practiced and published in the field of telecommunications law (he authored, with Glen Robinson, the casebook Communications Regulation), and is an expert on the Supreme Court’s constitutional equal protection and due process jurisprudence.

Nachbar also works in national security. He teaches and writes on cybersecurity, with an emphasis on security of communication networks and the connection between network security and private industry. He is the convener of the Stanton Series on Liberty and Security — an annual meeting of leaders in industry, government, academia and civil society to discuss the issues they face and foresee in the relationship between the free flow of information and national security — which is organized and hosted by the Law School each spring and sponsored by the Stanton Foundation. He is a judge advocate in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he has, among other assignments, edited an Army handbook on the development of legal systems, trained Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and deployed to Iraq. He is a senior fellow at the Center for National Security Law, a faculty affiliate of the National Security Policy Center at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the University of Virginia Applied Research Institute.