James D. Nelson
Vinson & Elkins Professor of Law
James Nelson is the Vinson & Elkins Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center. He works at the intersection of corporate, employment, and constitutional law. His current research focuses on rights of speech, religion, and association in the workplace.
Prior to joining the Law Center, Professor Nelson was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School. After graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Virginia Law Review, he clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and then served as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Professor Nelson’s legal scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and others. He has served on the Executive Committees for the AALS Section on Business Associations and the Section on Law & Religion. Professor Nelson is a recipient of the All-University Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship and the All-University Teaching Excellence Award.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Expressive Association at Work, 124 Michigan Law Review (forthcoming 2026) (with Elizabeth Sepper & Charlotte Garden)
Disestablishment at Work, 134 Yale Law Journal (forthcoming 2025)
Second-Order Decisions in Rights Conflicts, 109 Virginia Law Review 1095 (2023) (with Micah Schwartzman)
Religion Law and Political Economy, 108 Iowa Law Review 2341 (2023) (with Elizabeth Sepper) (invited symposium)
Government’s Religious Hospitals, 109 Virginia Law Review 61 (2023) (with Elizabeth Sepper)
The Separation of Ownership and Conscience, 48 Journal of Corporation Law 577 (2023)
The Religious Conversion of Corporate Social Responsibility, 71 Emory Law Journal 217 (2021) (with Elizabeth Sepper)
Some Realism about Corporate Crime, 83 Law & Contemporary Problems 113 (2020)
The Untenable Case for Keeping Investors in the Dark, 10 Harvard Business Law Review (forthcoming 2020) (with Lucian Bebchuk, Robert J. Jackson, Jr., and Roberto Tallarita)
Corporate Disestablishment, 105 Virginia Law Review 595 (2019)
The Trouble with Corporate Conscience, 71 Vanderbilt Law Review 1655 (2018)
Corporations, Unions, and the Illusion of Symmetry, 102 Virginia Law Review 1969 (2016)
The Freedom of Business Association, 115 Columbia Law Review 461 (2015)
Conscience, Incorporated, 2013 Michigan State Law Review 1565
