Nomi M. Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lilly Shapell chair at the USC Gould School of Law. Ms. 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 the law school. Her academic research includes law and religion, cultural pluralism, law and liberalism, law and feminism, 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 campuswide.
Stolzenberg’s writings on law and religion include the widely 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). More 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 the author, with David Myers, of the forthcoming book American Shtetl, a detailed study of the Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, NY, that explores the conundrum of an anti-secular, anti-modern religious community flourishing in a modern liberal secular state.
