A student and his mentor

Omar Noureldin (JD 2014) went from taking Professor Rebecca Brown’s class to co-teaching with her

By Christina Schweighofer

When USC Gould Professor Rebecca Brown asked him last year to co-teach a class with her, Omar Noureldin JD ’14 thought, “Oh, my gosh! I get to develop a course with Rebecca Brown?”

Prof. Rebecca Brown confers with Omar Noureldin JD ’14 as they plan their fall semester course.

His excitement is understandable; the invitation meant that only four years after being her student he would be Brown’s colleague for a class on current constitutional problems last fall. For Noureldin, it was a new milestone in an already fast-paced, high-profile career centered on higher principles and values.

The son of an immigrant from Egypt and an Angeleno, Noureldin grew up in an interracial, interreligious environment (his father’s family is Muslim, his mother’s family is Roman Catholic), and he attended schools in the United States and the Middle East.

The global upbringing taught him a lesson: What some people hold as absolutely true others do not, but our shared humanity overrides all differences. From there, Noureldin early on derived a purpose for his life: he wanted to use his broad perspective “to help others talk to each other, to bridge divides and create understanding.”

Brown, who is the Rader Family Trustee Chair in Law at USC Gould and first taught Noureldin during his 3L year in a seminar called Constitutional Theory, remembers that he displayed “a particularly academic approach to studying the Constitution: very thoughtful, mature and steeped in theory.” Clearly showing “a promise for academia,” he also impressed her with his active engagement in social justice and the improvement of public discourse. “I gained immense respect for his character,” she says.

Noureldin, on the other hand, appreciated Brown’s philosophical approach to constitutional law, where doctrine isn’t the end-all but a means that serves a larger purpose. “It was an amazing course,” he says.

Noureldin’s career since he graduated from USC Gould has taken him to disparate settings. There were stints as an attorney with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and clerkships for a federal judge for the Central District of California, Virginia Phillips, and for Ninth Circuit Judge and former USC Gould Dean Dorothy Nelson. In between, starting in January 2017, he spent 18 months as vice president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Because of the new administration’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries, Noureldin was frequently interviewed on cable news networks such as CNN, always seeking to further understanding.

Brown, who advised him throughout and recommended him for both clerkships, recognized in Noureldin an embodiment of many of the qualities and lessons that she learned from her own mentor, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked in 1985. Says Brown about her mentee: “Omar has given me a chance to invest in someone who will, I know, pass along to future students the ideas and values that I hold dear. It doesn’t get much better than that.”