Prof. Nicholas R. Parrillo

Nicholas R. Parrillo is William K. Townsend Professor of Law at Yale, with a secondary appointment as Professor of History. His research and teaching focus on administrative law and government bureaucracy and extend to legal history, remedies, and legislation. He is a recipient of the ABA’s award for the year’s best scholarship in administrative law and the Law and Society Association’s Hurst prize for the year’s best book in legal history. Parrillo’s articles since 2018 include a study in the Yale Law Journal finding new originalist evidence against a narrow constitutional understanding of administrative regulatory power; a study in the Harvard Law Review giving the first general assessment of how the judiciary handles the federal government's disobedience to court orders; and a study that provided the empirical basis for the U.S. Administrative Conference’s best practices on the federal government’s ubiquitous but controversial use of guidance documents and was the focal point for an online symposium on that controversy. Peer scholars at Jotwell selected each of these three studies as among the “best new scholarship relevant to the law.” Parrillo has testified before Congress, serves as one of forty public members of the U.S. Administrative Conference, and has been an invited speaker before the Second Circuit Judicial Conference, the law-and-science committee of the National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Department of Justice’s summit on administrative procedure. He is a recipient of Yale Law School’s annual teaching award.