D’Onfro is a professor of law at Washington University School of Law, where she teaches property, advanced private law seminar, and corporations. Her research uses private law theory, history and economics to study real property, debt and emerging assets. She is a two-time recipient of the David M. Becker Professor of the Year Award (2022, 2026) and was elected to the American Law Institute in 2026.
Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, the Vanderbilt Law Review, and the Washington Law Review, among other venues.
She is currently working on a series of papers about the role of private law in interpreting federal rights. Her most recent article Constitutional Rights and General Private Law (with Daniel Epps) 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.