David A. Westbrook

In 2011, Westbrook published Deploying Ourselves: Islamist Violence, Globalization, and the Responsible Projection of U.S. Force.

Westbrook has researched on political economy and discussed the contextual changes in politics and highlighted how globalization affected the law. In the early 2010s, he authored a paper discussing the economy of North Atlantic countries and highlighted the presented approaches for collective thinking and decision making. Westbrook focused on three movements and discussed the various methods for forming an elite consensus along with the relevant major conceptual obstacles.

In 2010, Westbrook published his book, Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets', which was reviewed as "a fascinating new book" which "is a compelling and entertaining diatribe against some of the sacred cows of finance." Mae Kuykendall reviewed that "Westbrook draws on his wide knowledge of law, finance, literary theory, cultural anthropology, and political history to guide us through our recent disaster."

Westbrook also considers what it means to be an intellectual under contemporary circumstances. His book, Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (2009), considers the refunctioning of ethnography to address modern life, and was written out of conversation with the anthropologists George Marcus and Douglas Holmes. Werner Kraus wrote: "The transition from admiration of the ethnographic method per se to an exploration of multisited fieldwork and the paraethnographic is fluent and often enough brilliant." According to Tobias Rees, "the book is the result of the anthropologists' effort to engage the paraethnographer in a discussion about anthropology and its current dilemma."

Westbrook published his book, City Of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent in 2003. The book was reviewed as "a powerful demonstration of the limits at which global capitalism may be seen as an effective and efficient way of organizing economic interaction in our cosmopolitan society." According to E. Fuat Keyman, "In City of Gold, Westbrook makes a significant contribution to the literature on globalization by going beyond a purely market-based or a state-centric analysis of social change".

Westbrook clerked at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit from 1993 till 1995 for Judge S. Jay Plager and then worked as an Associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. He joined the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York, as an Associate Professor in 1998 and was promoted to Professor in 2004. During his term at the University, Westbrook was appointed as Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar from 2007 till 2013. He became Louis A. Del Cotto Professor in 2013.

Westbrook received his B.A. degree in German Studies in 1988 from Emory University, where he was a Woodruff Scholar. He studied with and worked as a Research Associate for Harold J. Berman at Emory University Law School. In 1992, he received his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a Ford Fellow in Public International Law. Westbrook wrote his thesis and was a teaching assistant for Mary Ann Glendon.