Nomi Stolzenberg

Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law
Last Updated: September 12, 2023

Nomi M. Stolzenberg joined the USC Gould School of Law faculty in 1988. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. A strong proponent of multidisciplinary research and teaching, she helped establish and co-directs the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, which involves scholars and students from throughout USC’s campus.

Stolzenberg’s scholarly publications include the frequently cited “He Drew a Circle that Shut Me Out’: Assimilation, Indoctrination, and the Paradox of a Liberal Education” (Harvard Law Review), “The Profanity of Law” (in Law and the Sacred, Stanford University Press) and “Righting the Relationship Between Race and Religion in Law” (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies). With David N. Myers, she has just published AMERICAN SHTETL: THE MAKING OF KIRYAS JOEL, A HASIDIC VILLAGE IN UPSTATE NEW YORK (Princeton University Press, 2022), a book-length exploration of the Satmar community which established its own municipality and school district, the constitutionality of which were challenged in multiple lawsuits. Her most recent works focus on issues of religious accommodation and political theology and she is currently at work on developing a theory of “faith-based discrimination.”

A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Stolzenberg was an editor on the Harvard Law Review and clerked for Judge John J. Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, prior to joining USC Gould. She is a member of the Casden Center’s Advisory Board, the Radcliffe Accelerator Group on Religion and Racism, the Progressive Property Roundtable, and the editorial board of the Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. She teaches First Amendment Law and the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, and in the past has taught courses on Property Law, Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory, and Law and Literature. She also teaches a course to undergraduates on “Concepts of Law.”