Professor of law and Justice John J. Francis Scholar at Rutgers University School of Law (Newark), David Troutt earned his BA with distinction from Stanford University and his JD cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as executive editor of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1995. As a lawyer, he practiced both public interest and corporate law, advocating on a broad range of areas including inner-city economic development, intellectual property, and commercial litigation. Professor Troutt writes in several areas combining law and other disciplines.

In 1998 Professor Troutt published The Monkey Suit and Other Short Fiction on African Americans and Justice (New Press), a collection of stories chronicling the imagined experiences of African Americans involved in actual legal controversies from 1830 to the present. In addition to publications analyzing poverty in California cities, his nonfiction work includes regular columns about race, law, and society in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals. He published an essay, "The Race Industry, Police Brutality and the Law of Mothers," in Not Guilty: Twelve Black Men on Life, Law and Justice, edited by Jabari Asim. Professor Troutt  and his wife, Shawn, live in Brooklyn.