Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law
E-mail: vfnourse@wisc.edu
Telephone: (608)262-5503
Office: Room 9107, Law School
Education:
B.A., Stanford University
J.D., University of California-Berkeley
Recently Taught Courses
746 Legislation
904 SP Con Law: 20th Century Constitution
943 Sel Probs Legislation: Doing Legislative History
Biography
Victoria Nourse is the Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin. She has been a visiting professor at Yale and NYU law schools and the Lamar Professor of Law at Emory University. Professor Nourse teaches courses in legislation, statutory interpretation, constitutional history, and criminal law. Her recent book In Reckless Hands (Norton 2008) has been praised for its "exemplary legal writing" and its commitment to tell the lost history of a home-schooled lawyer who, during the Depression, brings an unlikely cast of characters and their plight to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Professor Nourse has written over two dozen articles on Congress, statutory interpretation, constitutional history and the criminal law, published in Yale, Stanford, Penn, Texas and other law reviews. In 2009, she published 3 articles: A Tale of Two Lochners in the California Law Review; The Lost History of Governance and Equality (with Sarah Maguire) in the Duke Law Journal; and Varieties of New Legal Realism: Can a A New World Order Yield A New Legal Theory? (with Greg Shaffer) in the Cornell Law Review. In 2010, she will publish a book review essay, Toward A Representational Theory of the Executive (with Jack Figura) in the Boston University Law Review and, in 2011, Misunderstanding Congress: Statutory Interpretation, the Supermajoritarian Difficulty, and the Separation of Powers, in the Georgetown Law Journal.
Professor Nourse came to teaching after a series of assignments in Washington and New York. She was Senior Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee under the Chairmanship of then-Senator, now Vice-President, Joseph Biden where she was charged with drafting Senator Biden's Violence Against Women Act (see Equal: Women Reshape American Law 309-444 (Norton 2009)). Professor Nourse came to the Judiciary Committee from appellate practice in the Justice Department, where she argued cases in the D.C. Circuit and other courts of appeal. Prior to that, she served as Special Counsel to the Senate Iran-Contra committee. She began practice in New York at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, after clerking for Judge Edward Weinfeld (S.D.N.Y). She is an order of the coif graduate of the University of California (Boalt) law school; and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University.
