Jennifer Nou Profiled in Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Program Feature
A New Generation of Scholars: Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Program Supports Early-Career Faculty
Jennifer Nou’s fascination with administrative law began with the knowledge that it combines big, philosophical questions about government with practical issues that affect real people.
“The air we breathe, the food we eat, the workplaces that we sit in, are all governed by the administrative state,” Nou said. “To me, the field grapples with these arid, theoretical debates in political philosophy and how they intersect with the real-life project that is the law.”
Nou’s scholarship looks at government agencies as autonomous institutions, rather than as mere subordinates to the legislative and executive branches. Currently, she is examining the statutes that govern the separations of power within different agencies—laws that, according to Nou, yield parallels to the constitutions that govern democratic nations around the world.
As a Neubauer professor, Nou has had the opportunity to connect with faculty outside the Law School, and she often finds that her colleagues in different disciplines present questions relevant to her own work.
At an event last year that brought assistant professors in the Neubauer program together, Nou attended physicist David Miller’s presentation on the construction of a particle collider. During the talk, in an effort to engage with Nou’s research, Miller charted the leadership structure within the National Science Foundation. His insights about the organization’s governance and appointments process, Nou said, were remarkably germane to her own scholarship.
“These conversations really illuminate how much you can learn from those in other disciplines,” she said.
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