Nomi Stolzenberg

Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law

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nstolzen@law.usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-2549
Fax: (213) 740-5502
Room: 476

Nomi M. Stolzenberg joined the USC 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.

Professor 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, 1993); “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” (Harvard Law Review, 1998); “The Property of Culture,” (Daedalus, fall 2000) and the forthcoming “The Profanity of Law” (in Law and the Sacred, Stanford University Press). 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, Professor 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 Law. She is a member of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities and Phi Beta Kappa, and she sits on the editorial boards of Theory and Research in Education and the newly launched Journal of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Professor Stolzenberg teaches Property; Law, Language, and Ethics; Law and Literature; and seminars on a variety of interdisciplinary topics. Most recently, she has begun teaching Family Law.

Works in Progress

• American Shtetl: How a Jewish Village Took Root in the U.S. (book) with David N. Myers.
• Facts on the Ground (book)

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Facts on the Ground,” forthcoming in Property and Community (Eduardo Penalver & Gregory Alexander, eds., Oxford U. Press, 2010).
• “Kiryas Joel from the Bottom Up,” forthcoming in Jews in the Legal Profession (Suzanne Stone & Marc Galanter, eds.)
• “Bd. of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet: A Religious Group's Quest For Its Own Public School,” forthcoming in Law and Religion: Cases in Context (Leslie C. Griffin, ed., Aspen, 2010).
• “Free Speech and Free Love: The Law and Literature of the First Amendment,” with Hilary M. Schor, forthcoming in the Modern Language Association’s Compendium on Law and Literature.
• “Liberalism in Love,” forthcoming Quinnipiac Law Review
• “Maternity and Paternity,” in The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion (Richard Schweder & Anne Dailey, et al., eds., University of Chicago Press).
• “Liberalism in a Romantic State,” 5 Law, Culture and the Humanities 194 (2009).
• “The Profanity of Law,” in Law and the Sacred (Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas & Martha Merrill Umphrey, eds., Stanford U. Press, 2007).
• “Anti-Anxiety Law: Winnicott and the Legal Fiction of Paternity,” 64 American Imago 339 (2007).
• “Waldron’s Locke and Locke’s Waldron: A Review of Jeremy Waldron’s God, Locke, and Equality” (with Gideon Yaffe), 49 Inquiry 186 (2006).
• “Liberals and Libertines: The Marriage Question in the Liberal Political Imagination,” 42 San Diego Law Review 949 (2005). - (Hein)
• “Spiritual Custody: Religious Freedom and Coercion in the Family,” in The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review, Volume 3, 1-39 (Barry Glassner & Hilary Taub Lachoff, eds., 2004).
• “The Phantom of Integration, or the Uncanny Case of Kaadan,” in The Jewish Political Tradition, Volume 2, 554-561 (Michael Walzer, Yair Lorberbaum & Noam Zohar, eds., Yale U. Press, 2003).
• “Bastard Daughters and Illegitimate Mothers: Burning Down the Courthouse” (co-authored with Hilary M. Schor) in REAL Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature: Law and Literature, Vol. 18, 109-129 (2002).
• “The Culture of Property,” in Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies (Richard Shweder, Martha Minow, & Hazel Rose Markus, eds., Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002).
• “The Return of the Repressed: Illiberal Groups in a Liberal State,” 12 Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 897 (2002). - (Hein)
• “Bentham’s Theory of Legal Fictions -- A ‘Curious Double Language’,” 11 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 223 (1999)
• “A Tale of Two Villages (or Legal Realism Comes to Town,” in NOMOS XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights (Ian Shapiro & Will Kymlicka, eds., New York University Press, 1997)
• “The Puzzling Persistence of Community: The Cases of Airmont and Kiryas Joel,” in From Ghetto to Emancipation: Historical and Contemporary Reconsiderations of the Jewish Community (David N. Myers & William V. Rowe, eds., University of Scranton Press, 1997)
• “'He Drew A Circle That Shut Me Out': Assimilation, Indoctrination, and the Paradox of A Liberal Education,” 106 Harvard Law Review 581 (1993). - (Hein)

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