Professor Nourse is one of the nation’s leading scholars on statutory interpretation, Congress, and the separation of powers.

Her most recent book is “The Impeachments of Donald Trump: An Introduction to Constitutional Argument” (2021).” She is the author of Misreading Law, Misreading Democracy, that was published by Harvard Press in 2016. She has also published widely on the power of the President and the separation of powers, Reclaiming the Constitutional Text from Originalism: The Case of Executive Power, 106 Calif. L. Rev. 1 (2018), and on constitutional rights, including her book, In Reckless Hands (Norton 2008), the story of Skinner v. Oklahoma and American eugenics. She is a coauthor with Yale’s William Eskridge and Abbe Gluck of the most up to date casebook on legislation: Statutes, Regulation, and Interpretation: Legislation and Administration in the Republic of Statutes (2014 & 2018 Supp.)

Professor Nourse has had a distinguished career in government up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. In 2015-2016, she served as Chief Counsel to the Vice President of the United States. Prior to that she served as an appellate lawyer in the Justice Department and Special Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The story of her role in the fight for the original Violence Against Women Act is told in the 2009 book Equal: Women Reshape American Law.

Prior to teaching at Georgetown, Professor Nourse held chairs at the Emory University and the University of Wisconsin. She has also been a visiting professor at Yale, NYU, Northwestern, and the University of Maryland.

Professor Nourse began her legal career in New York, clerking for a legendary trial judge, Edward Weinfeld, and practicing at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. She left private practice to serve as junior counsel to the Senate-Iran Contra Committee under Senators Rudman and Inouye.

Professor Nourse is Director of the law schools’ first Center on Congressional Studies.

Scholarship

Forthcoming Works - Journal Articles & Working Papers

Kevin Tobia, Neel U. Sukhatme & Victoria Nourse, Is Originalism Orthodoxy? (working paper). [SSRN]
Victoria Nourse, The Paradoxes of a Unified Judicial Philosophy: An Empirical Study of the New Supreme Court, 2020-2022, Const. Comment. (forthcoming 2023). [Gtown Law] [SSRN]

Contributions to Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals

Kevin Tobia, Brian Slocum & Victoria Nourse, Ordinary Meaning and Ordinary People, 171 U. Pa. L. Rev. 365-458 (2023). [WWW] [Gtown Law] [HEIN] [W] [L] [SSRN]
Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum & Victoria Nourse, Statutory Interpretation from the Outside, 122 Colum. L. Rev. 213-329 (2022).
[WWW] [Gtown Law] [HEIN] [W] [L] [SSRN]
Kevin Tobia, Brian Slocum & Victoria Nourse, Progressive Textualism, 110 Geo. L.J. 1437-1493 (2022).
[WWW] [HEIN] [W] [L]