Ph.D. (American Studies), Yale University, 2012
J.D., Yale Law School, 2004
A.B., Harvard University, 2000
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 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 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, in selecting the “best new scholarship relevant to the law,” selected each of these three studies (one of them twice). Parrillo has testified before Congress, been cited by the Supreme Court, is a senior fellow of the U.S. Administrative Conference, and has been an instructor at the New York Historical Society’s Reiss Graduate Institute and an invited speaker before the Second Circuit Judicial Conference, the law-and-science committee of the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Justice’s summit on administrative procedure, and two times before the Federalist Society’s national convention. He is a recipient of Yale Law School’s annual teaching award.
“Fiduciary Government and Public Officers’ Incentives,” in Fiduciary Government, ed. Evan J. Criddle et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 146-160.
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.
“Testing Weber: Compensation for Public Services, Bureaucratization, and the Development of Positive Law in the United States,” in Comparative Administrative Law, 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.
“‘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.
“Lincoln’s Calvinist Transformation: Emancipation and War,” Civil War History 46 (2000): 227- 253. Republished in On Lincoln, 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”).
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).
Written Testimony 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: Parrillo opening statement at 36:45.)
Review of Federal Ground, by Gregory Ablavsky, American Journal of Legal History 61 (2021).
“The New Executive Orders on Guidance: Initial Reactions,” Notice & Comment Blog, Oct. 10, 2019
“Challenges Agencies Face in Communicating by Guidance,” Notice & Comment Blog, Jan. 31, 2018
“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 Making the Modern American Fiscal State, by Ajay Mehrotra, Journal of American History 101 (March 2015): 1225-26.
“What Is the Future of Scholarly Books in the Digital Age?” Legal History Blog, Nov. 26, 2013.
“Impartial Decisionmaker,” in Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2: 798-801.
