Nicholas R. Parrillo

William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Professor of History
Education

Ph.D. (American Studies), Yale University, 2012

J.D., Yale Law School, 2004

A.B., Harvard University, 2000

Courses Taught
  • Administrative Law
  • Advanced Administrative Law
  • American Legal History
  • Bureaucracy
  • Remedies
  • Legislation
Nicholas Parrillo

Nicholas R. Parrillo is 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 has won the ABA’s award(link is external)1 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(link is external)2. Parrillo’s articles include a study(link is external)3 finding new originalist evidence for the constitutionality of administrative regulatory power, published in the Yale Law Journal and discussed by the en banc Fifth Circuit(link is external)4 and the U.S. Solicitor General(link is external)5; a study(link is external)6 of how the judiciary handles the federal government’s disobedience to court orders, published in the Harvard Law Review and discussed in The New York Times(link is external)7, USA Today(link is external)8, and NPR(link is external)9; and a study(link is external)10 that provided the empirical basis for best practices(link is external)11 adopted by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) on the federal government’s ubiquitous but controversial use of guidance documents. Peer scholars at Jotwell, in selecting the “best new scholarship(link is external)12” in law, selected each of these(link is external)13 three(link is external)14 studies(link is external)15 (one of them twice(link is external)16). Parrillo has testified(link is external)17 before Congress, been quoted(link is external)18 by the U.S. Supreme Court, is a senior fellow(link is external)19 of ACUS, and has been an instructor(link is external)20 at the New York Historical Society’s graduate institute and an invited speaker before the Second Circuit Judicial Conference, the U.S. Department of Justice (in 2019(link is external)21 and again in 2024), the ACLU national legal staff, and the Federalist Society’s national convention (two(link is external)22 times(link is external)23).  He is a recipient of Yale Law School’s annual teaching award(link is external)24.

News

Principal Publications

"Foreign Affairs, Nondelegation, and Original Meaning: Congress’s Delegation of Power to Lay Embargoes in 1794,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 172 (2024): 1803-1843.(link is external)32

  • Commissioned by Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith for symposium on “The Statutory Foreign Affairs Presidency”

“Nondelegation, Original Meaning, and Early Federal Taxation: A Dialogue with My Critics,” Drake Law Review 71 (2024): 367-434(link is external)33, with online appendix here(link is external)34

“A Critical Assessment of the Originalist Case Against Administrative Regulatory Power: New Evidence from the Federal Tax on Private Real Estate in the 1790s,” Yale Law Journal 130 (2021): 1288-1455.(link is external)3

“Towards an Administrative Law of Central Banking,” Yale Journal on Regulation 38 (2021): 1-89 (with Peter Conti-Brown and Yair Listokin).(link is external)42

“Should the Public Get to Participate Before Federal Agencies Issue Guidance? An Empirical Study,” 44Administrative Law Review44 71: 57-125 (2019).44(link is external)43

“Negotiating the Federal Government’s Compliance with Court Orders: An Initial Exploration,” 44North Carolina Law Review44 97: 899-932 (2019).44(link is external)45

“Federal Agency Guidance and the Power to Bind: An Empirical Study of Agencies and Industries,” Yale Journal on Regulation 36 (2019): 165-271.(link is external)10

“Fiduciary Government and Public Officers’ Incentives,” in Fiduciary Government(link is external)47, ed. Evan J. Criddle et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 146-160.

“The Endgame of Administrative Law: Governmental Disobedience and the Judicial Contempt Power,” Harvard Law Review 131 (2018): 685-794.(link is external)6

“Federal Agency Guidance: An Institutional Perspective,” Final Report to the Administrative Conference of the United States (Oct. 12, 2017).(link is external)52

“Jerry Mashaw’s Creative Tension with the Field of Administrative Law” in Administrative Law from the Inside Out: Essays on Themes in the Work of Jerry Mashaw, ed. Nicholas R. Parrillo (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).(link is external)56

Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

“Leviathan and Interpretive Revolution: The Administrative State, the Judiciary, and the Rise of Legislative History, 1890-1950,” Yale Law Journal 123 (2013): 266-411.(link is external)68

  • Received Cromwell Article Prize (American Society for Legal History) for the year’s best article on American legal history by an early-career scholar. 

“Testing Weber: Compensation for Public Services, Bureaucratization, and the Development of Positive Law in the United States,” in Comparative Administrative Law(link is external)69, ed. Susan Rose- Ackerman and Peter L. Lindseth (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010).

“The De-Privatization of American Warfare: How the U.S. Government Used, Regulated, and Ultimately Abandoned Privateering in the Nineteenth Century,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 19 (2007): 1-96.(link is external)70

“‘The Government at the Mercy of Its Contractors’: How the New Deal Lawyers Reshaped the Common Law to Challenge the Defense Industry in World War II,” Hastings Law Journal 57 (2005): 93-197.(link is external)71

“Lincoln’s Calvinist Transformation: Emancipation and War,” Civil War History 46 (2000): 227- 253. Republished in On Lincoln(link is external)72, ed. John T. Hubbell (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014), volume 3 of Civil War History Readers (“a multivolume series reintroducing the most influential articles published in the journal”).

Casebook

Administrative Law: The American Public Law System: Cases and Materials, 9th ed. (West, 2025) (with Jerry L. Mashaw, Peter M. Shane, Aditya Bamzai, Emily S. Bremer, and Margaret B. Kwoka)(link is external)73.

Edited Volume

Administrative Law from the Inside Out: Essays on Themes in the Work of Jerry Mashaw, ed. Nicholas R. Parrillo (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Congressional Testimony 

Written Testimony(link is external)74 Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “Shining Light on the Federal Regulatory Process,” March 14, 2018 (Video of hearing(link is external)75: Parrillo opening statement at 36:45.)

Short Pieces

A Response to the En Banc Fifth Circuit’s Discussion of My Work on Nondelegation, Notice & Comment Blog, August 1, 2024(link is external)76

Symposium Introduction for William Novak’s New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State, Notice & Comment Blog, July 18, 2022(link is external)77

Margaret Kwoka’s Saving the Freedom of Information Act as a Model for the Empirical Study of Administrative Law, Notice & Comment Blog, Feb. 1, 2022(link is external)78

A Brief Response to Philip Hamburger on Nondelegation, Original Meaning, and the Direct Tax of 1798, Notice & Comment Blog, Jan. 20, 2022 (link is external)79

Review of Federal Ground, by Gregory Ablavsky, American Journal of Legal History 61 (2021).(link is external)80

“Towards an Administrative Law of Central Banking,” Oxford Business Law Blog, May 17, 2021 (with Peter Conti-Brown and Yair Listokin)(link is external)81

“Judge Stephen F. Williams, 1936-2020” Notice & Comment Blog, August 9, 2020 (with Peter Conti-Brown, Kristina Daugirdas, Daniel E. Ho, and Anne Joseph O’Connell)(link is external)82

“The Contempt Finding and Sanctions Against Secretary DeVos and the Department of Education,” 44Notice & Comment Blog44, Oct. 30, 201944(link is external)83

“The New Executive Orders on Guidance: Initial Reactions,” 44Notice & Comment Blog44, Oct. 10, 201944(link is external)84

Review of Inventing American Exceptionalism, by Amalia D. Kessler, Law and History Review 36 (2018): 1101-03. (link is external)85

“Understanding and Addressing Controversies About Agency Guidance,” Regulatory Review, March 5, 2018 (with Lee Liberman Otis)(link is external)86

“Challenges Agencies Face in Communicating by Guidance,” Notice & Comment Blog, Jan. 31, 2018(link is external)87

“68th Plenary Preview: Agency Guidance,” Administrative Fix Blog (Administrative Conference of the United States), December 7, 2017(link is external)88

“The Fate of the Clean Power Plan Case: Hold in Abeyance, or Remand?” Notice & Comment Blog, May 5, 2017 (link is external)89

“Bureaucratic Power and the Rule of Law,” review of Tocqueville’s Nightmare, by Daniel Ernst, Reviews in American History 43 (Sept. 2015): 544-49.(link is external)90

“Administrative Constitutionalism and Administrative Power,” RegBlog, Symposium on Sophia Lee’s The Workplace Constitution, April 1, 2015(link is external)91

“Remarks Accepting the Section’s 2014 Annual Scholarship Award for Against the Profit Motive,” Administrative & Regulatory Law News, 40, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 7-9.

Review of(link is external)92 Making the Modern American Fiscal State, by Ajay Mehrotra,(link is external)92 Journal of American History(link is external)92 101 (March 2015): 1225-26.(link is external)92

“The Salary Revolution and the Marks of Government’s Distinctness: A Response to Jon Michaels,” Harvard Law Review Forum 128, no. 99 (Feb. 10, 2015(link is external)93)

 “The Banishment of the Profit Motive from American Government—and Its Return?” Balkinization, June 12, 2014.(link is external)94

“American Fiscal State-Building, Crisis, and Contingency,” PrawfsBlawg, Symposium on Ajay Mehrotra’s Making the Modern American Fiscal State, June 10, 2014.(link is external)95

“What Is the Future of Scholarly Books in the Digital Age?” Legal History Blog, Nov. 26, 2013.(link is external)96

“Researching State Legislative Records: The Biggest Obstacle in American Legal History,” Legal History Blog, Nov. 13, 2013.(link is external)97

“Impartial Decisionmaker,” in Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties(link is external)98, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2: 798-801.