Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame Law School

Richard W. Garnett is the Paul J. Schierl Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches and writes about the freedoms of speech, association, and religion and about constitutional law more generally. He is a leading authority on questions and debates regarding church-state relations and the role of religious believers and beliefs in society. He has published widely on these matters and is the author of dozens of law-review articles and book chapters and the co-author of three books. Professor Garnett is regularly invited to share analysis and commentary in national print and broadcast media, and he contributes to several law-related blogs, including Mirror of Justice and PrawfsBlawg.

He is the founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society, an interdisciplinary project that focuses on the role of religious institutions, communities, and authorities in the social order. He served on the Notre Dame Task Force on Catholic Education, is a Fellow of the University’s Institute for Educational Initiatives, and consults regularly with the Alliance for Catholic Education.

Professor Garnett clerked for the late Chief Justice of the United States, William H. Rehnquist, during the Court’s 1996 term and also for the late Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Richard S. Arnold. He earned his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995 and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Duke University in 1990. He joined the faculty in 1999 after practicing law in Washington, D.C., with Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin. 

He and his wife, Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett, live in South Bend, Indiana and have four children.