Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett

Nicole Stelle Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, where she serves at the Associate Dean for External Engagement and directs the Notre Dame Education Law Project.  Her teaching and research focus on education law and policy, religious liberty, and topics related to property law (especially land use and urban development policies). In addition to dozens of articles on these subjects, she is the author of Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Ordering the City: Land Use, Policing and the Restoration of Urban America (Yale University Press, 2009).

Garnett received her B.A. with distinction in Political Science from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Morris S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining the law school faculty in 1999, she worked for two years as a staff attorney at the Institute for Justice, a non-profit public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C., where she helped to defend the constitutionality of the nation's first private-school-choice programs.

At Notre Dame, Garnett is a faculty fellow in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate, and deNicola Center for Ethics and Culture.  She is also a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.