New Faculty: Nathaniel Donahue

“I’m a magpie. I like shiny objects,” says Nathaniel Donahue, who joined NYU Law’s full-time faculty in June as assistant professor of law, after two years at the Law School as a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History. “I just want to find weird stuff, group it in a pile, and then show it to people.” His scholarly focus is on what’s known as the long 19th century, spanning the period from the French Revolution to the beginning of World War I.

Spend some time chatting with Donahue, and shiny objects from this time come tumbling out. For example, to address the problem of people not wanting to serve as constable, the town of Flatlands, New York (now part of Brooklyn), simply mandated that the resident closest to age 45 fill the office for a year. And to build and maintain roads 200 years ago, it was not uncommon for localities to conscript residents for “road juries,” just as people today are summoned to be trial jurors.

These nuggets emerged from Donahue’s research for the history PhD that he is close to completing at Yale University, with a dissertation titled “The Force of Law: Conscription, Governance, and the Organization of Power in Nineteenth-Century America.” Before arriving at Washington Square, Donahue earned an MA and an MPhil in history and a JD, all at Yale, and he clerked for Chief Judge Rowan Wilson on the New York Court of Appeals.

His research does more than unearth bright baubles. “Nathaniel’s scholarship brings profound historical erudition and intellectual creativity to bear on some of the most complex legal questions of today,” says Associate Professor of Law and fellow legal historian Noah Rosenblum. “He systematically reconstructs forgotten legal regimes to show how they continue to shape law now.”

Donahue notes that “a lot of people in the legal academy are starting to realize how much interesting jurisprudence here is from [the long 19th century].” He adds, “Often people want to sort of bring back parts of it, [which] I think makes it more important to have historians who are putting this kind of jurisprudence in context.”

With an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation now ascendant at the US Supreme Court, Donahue’s work has particular salience. In an April 2026 Yale Law Journal article, he reached back to English common law, American colonial practice, and developments through the 1800s to argue that the historical record is inconsistent with many originalist justifications for the unitary executive theory, advanced in recent cases in favor of untrammeled presidential power. In Trump v. Slaughter, Donahue and Rosenblum co-authored an amicus brief in which they marshaled the historical record to support Congress’s ability to limit the president’s power to remove members of independent agencies. While the Court’s ruling went the other direction, giving the president broad leeway to fire regulators at independent agencies, their brief was cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent.

Yale Law Professor John Fabian Witt, one of Donahue’s dissertation advisors, calls him “a scholar’s scholar.” Donahue, says Witt, “is obsessed in the best way with legal institutions and rules, with their structure and their logic. That’s why on the teaching market last year he was prepared o teach nearly every basic course in the law curriculum. When it comes to law, Nathaniel is genuinely interested in the whole thing. He wants to know how its parts fit together.” At NYU Law, Donahue is on tap to teach torts and civil procedure, as well as a seminar on the history of the American judicial system starting in Spring 2027.

Away from work, Donahue says, he and his wife, Maia Silber, an assistant professor in NYU’s history department, enjoy “dog spotting” during walks in the city, admiring the diversity of New York’s canine population. The dog park across the street from the Law School is “a big perk of working here,” he notes.

Donahue has also been known to submit entries to Wired magazine’s six-word-story competition. Asked to write his own profile for this magazine with those parameters, he suggests: “NYU Law enters the 19th century.”—Michael Orey