Nomi Stolzenberg

Professor of Law, University of Southern California
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, cultural pluralism, law and liberalism, and law and literature. A strong proponent of multidisciplinary research and teaching, she helped establish the USC Center for Law, History and Culture, which involves scholars and students from throughout USC’s campus.

Stolzenberg’s scholarly publications are widely respected. Among them are 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). Her most recent works focus on issues of religious accommodation ("It's About Money: The Fundamental Contradiction of Hobby Lobby) and political theology ("Political Theology With a Difference" and "Is There Such a Thing as Non-State Law? Lessons from Kiryas Joel.") She is currently at work on a book about the Satmar community of Kiryas Joel with David Myers, which explores the conundrum of an anti-secular, anti-modern, anti-liberal religious community flourishing in a modern liberal secular state.

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 Advisory Board of University of San Diego's Institute for Law and Religion; the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities; and Phi Beta Kappa. She sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Stolzenberg teaches Family Law, a course on the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, Property Law, Law and Literature, and seminars on a variety of interdisciplinary topics. She also teaches a course to undergraduates on "Concepts of Law."