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Nicholas Bagley is the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, where he teaches civil procedure, administrative law, legislation and regulation, and the law of contagion. His scholarship centers on the machinery of American government: how agencies are supervised, how courts review what they do, and why so much of that supervision has stopped working.

Before joining the Michigan faculty in 2010, he clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens on the United States Supreme Court and for Judge David S. Tatel on the D.C. Circuit, and served as an attorney in the Civil Division’s Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice, where he was lead counsel in more than two dozen federal appeals and argued a dozen cases in the courts of appeals. In 2022 he served as chief legal counsel to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and he was special counsel to the governor during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is a member of the American Law Institute, a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and a senior fellow at both the Niskanen Center and the Institute for Progress. His article Delegation at the Founding, written with Julian Davis Mortenson, was named the best administrative law article of 2022 by the American Bar Association; Centralized Oversight of the Regulatory State received the same honor in 2006.

His writing for a general audience appears regularly in The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a graduate of Yale University and NYU School of Law, where he was summa cum laude, and he began his career teaching eighth-grade English in the Bronx with Teach For America.