Background

Austin Nelson is an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. He teaches constitutional law and bankruptcy law.

Nelson’s recent research focuses on the development of federalism in the early United States and its downstream effects on modern federalism doctrines. In particular, Nelson studies antebellum debates within the federal government, between the federal and state governments, and between debtors and creditors over the extent of Congress’s bankruptcy power. In 2026, his Ph.D. dissertation on the Constitution’s Bankruptcy and Contract Clauses, America’s Bankrupt Constitution, won the Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association’s American Political Thought Section.

Nelson previously taught constitutional law at the University of Michigan Law School and clerked for the Honorable Lavenski R. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. As a law student at the University of Texas, he served on the editorial boards of two law journals and worked in the Supreme Court Clinic, which successfully represented the death-row inmate John Henry Ramirez in the U.S. Supreme Court case Ramirez v. Collier.

Nelson holds a Ph.D. in government and a J.D. with honors from the University of Texas, an M.P.P.A. with distinction from Baylor University, and a B.A. summa cum laude from Hendrix College. He is admitted to practice law in Texas.

Nelson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Belmont Law Review, George Mason Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Texas Review of Law & Politics.

Scholarship

• Constitutional Pluralism on the Marshall Court, 14 Belmont L.Rev. __ (forthcoming 2027).
• “Passing a Complete Code”: The Framers’ Failed Effort to Nationalize Contract Law, 33 Geo. Mason L. Rev.__ (forthcoming 2025).
• Evaluating the Evaluator: Has the ABA Rated President Trump’s Judicial Nominees Fairly?, 99 Tex. L. Rev. 193 (2020).
• A Pragmatic Approach to the Second Amendment, 24 Tex. Rev. L. & Pol. 263 (2019).

Education

• Ph.D., University of Texas 
• J.D., University of Texas
• M.P.P.A., Baylor University
• B.A., Hendrix College