Featured Faculty: Nicole Stelle Garnett
Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett’s scholarly interests were sparked when, as a young lawyer, she worked for a nonprofit group that litigated school choice cases and—to this day—continues to help poor, inner-city entrepreneurs get started in business. “I spent a lot of time in poor neighborhoods with my clients,” she says, “and I saw how a good school or a small business could make a huge difference, not just in the lives of the people directly affected by it but in the neighborhood as a whole.”
Since then, Garnett—who earned her J.D. from Yale in 1995—has focused her research on the impact that land-use laws have on urban community life. “I’m really interested in cities, city health, and the way that land-use policies affect the residents’ lives, particularly the urban poor,” says Garnett. She is completing a book that explores the intersection of two ideas that have revolutionized thinking about urban policy in recent years. The first is James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s “broken windows” hypothesis, which holds that urban disorder is a precursor to serious crime and social deviance. The second is Jane Jacobs’ assertion that healthy urban environments are busy, vibrant, and even somewhat disorderly ones. “Legal scholars tend to group all ‘disorder’ into one undifferentiated category,” Garnett observes, “but in reality, there are many kinds of disorder, some of them harmful and others benign or even affirmatively good.”
A prolific scholar, Garnett is also a Fellow of Notre Dame’s Institute for Educational Initiatives. She teaches a first-year property course and advanced classes in land use regulation, local government law, and cities and urban development. Her goal is to get students “to think critically about what the world really looks like, and how policies that we may have come to accept as natural or good may sometimes have unintended consequences.”
Garnett and her husband, Richard W. Garnett, joined the Law School faculty in 1999, and both were recently promoted to full professor. “We care intensely about the unique mission and identity of Notre Dame and it’s been a joy to help build this institution,” she says. “We’ve really assembled a great group of faculty here—we’re productive and energetic, and we’ve been able to attract top scholars with many other opportunities from other institutions. All of my colleagues really enrich and enliven our intellectual environment. Interacting with them makes me a better teacher and scholar.”
To learn more about Nicole Garnett, visit her faculty profile page.
