D’Onfro is a professor of law at Washington University School of Law, where she teaches property law, advanced private law seminar and corporations law. Her research uses private law theory, history and economics to study real property, debt and emerging assets.
She is currently working on a series of papers about the role of private law in interpreting federal rights, including Constitutional Rights and General Private Law (with Daniel Epps, the Howard and Caroline Cayne Distinguished Professor of Law), which argues that the private-law rights underlying federal constitutional provisions should be defined through general law principles rather than state positive law. A related project explores the legality of community benefit agreements and affordable housing set asides.