Nicole Summers is an Associate Professor at Georgetown Law, where she teaches first-year Property and Housing Law and Policy. Her research focuses primarily on issues related to housing, including eviction, regulation of substandard conditions, and fair housing law. She also specializes in access to justice, and in 2021-22 was an American Bar Foundation Access to Justice Faculty Scholar. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous law reviews including the Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and North Carolina Review, and peer-reviewed journals including Law and Social Inquiry and Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR). Her article Civil Probation was the winner of the 2023 AALS Scholarly Papers Competition for best work by a faculty member in their first five years of law teaching. Professor Summers is passionate about legal education and loves teaching.

Before joining the faculty, Professor Summers worked for many years in civil legal services as an eviction defense attorney. She did so as a Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau and the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School, as a staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders, and as a fellow at the Northeast Justice Center of Massachusetts. She also was previously a Legal Fellow at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Professor Summers received a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Brown University; a masters of arts in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University; and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to attending graduate school, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Nicaragua.

Scholarship

Contributions to Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals

Nicole Summers & Justin Steil, Pathways to Eviction, Law & Soc. Inquiry, FirstView, 2024, at 1-41. [WWW]
Nicole Summers, Civil Probation, 75 Stan. L. Rev. 847-915 (2023).
[WWW] [HEIN] [W] [L] [SSRN]
Nicole Summers, Eviction Court Displacement Rates, 117 Nw. U. L. Rev. 287-303 (2022). [WWW] [HEIN] [W] [L]
Larisa G. Bowman, Esme Caramello & Nicole Summers, Remembering Chief Justice Gants as a Champion for Housing Justice, 62 B.C. L. Rev. 2840-2859 (2021).
[HEIN] [W] [L]
Nicole Summers, The Limits of Good Law: A Study of Housing Court Outcomes, 87 U. Chi. L. Rev. 145-222 (2020)(reprinted in 29 J. Affordable Hous. & Cmty. Dev. L. 29 (2020)).
[WWW] [HEIN] [W] [L] [SSRN]