Nicole Stelle Garnett is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who also writes regularly for City Journal. She is the author of Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Ordering the City: Land Use, Policing and the Restoration of Urban America (Yale University Press, 2009) as well as numerous articles on education policy, urban development, and land-use planning.

Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives and the senior policy advisor for the Alliance for Catholic Education, a program engaged in a wide array of efforts to strengthen and sustain K-12 Catholic schools. In 2024, she was elected to the American Law Institute.

Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame in 1999, Garnett served as a law clerk for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Morris S. Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She also practiced law at the Institute for Justice, a non-profit public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C., where she helped to defend the inclusion of faith-based schools in private-school choice programs. She received her B.A. in Political Science, with distinction, from Stanford University and her J.D. from Yale Law School.

Photo by Barbara Johnston/University of Notre Dame