Georgetown Law

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/JPB Foundation Access to Justice Faculty Scholar. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, North Carolina Review, and peer-reviewed journals including 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.

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 was also previously a Legal Fellow at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. From 2015-16, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. 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.