David Noll

David Noll is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. His scholarship spans two principal areas: the dynamics of administrative law under conditions of political polarization and democratic stress, and the structure and legitimacy of complex litigation in the federal courts. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Lawfare, Texas Law Review, Cornell Law Review, and Michigan Law Review, and his popular writing has appeared in venues including The New York Times, Slate, Politico, and the New York Law Journal.

A central thread of Professor Noll’s administrative law scholarship concerns how partisan polarization and eroding commitments to the rule of law shape the behavior of administrative agencies. He introduced the concept of administrative sabotage to describe how political appointees can exploit their positions to undermine statutory programs they are charged with administering. More recent work examines federal courts’ contempt powers as a tool for maintaining the rule of law in the face of executive intransigence, examining both the historical foundations of that power and its modern limits.

Professor Noll’s second major area of research focuses on complex litigation in the federal courts. He is conducting a series of empirical studies of leadership structures in mass litigation, exploring how court-appointed lead attorneys are selected, the functions they perform, and how courts' appointment of lead attorneys gives rise to ad hoc regimes of public authority. He also has examined the statutory design of the Multidistrict Litigation Act of 1968, developing a framework for understanding how MDL practice and procedure can be reformed to be more legitimate, more efficient, and fairer to parties who participate in mass litigation. 

Beyond these two primary areas, Professor Noll is a leading expert on state-supported vigilantism. His book Vigilante Nation and article Vigilante Federalism (both with Jon Michaels, UCLA School of Law) examine how officials have encouraged private citizens to act as enforcers of the MAGA agenda and offer a framework for states to understand and counter that threat. This work has attracted significant attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and the press.

At Rutgers, Professor Noll teaches civil procedure, complex litigation, federal courts, legislation and regulation, and seminars on political history, the separation of powers, and presidential power. He previously served as the law school’s Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development, has twice been selected as a faculty commencement speaker, and won the law school's Greg Lastowka Award for Scholarly Excellence in 2019. He co-authors a leading casebook on the federal administrative process and is currently an academic fellow of the National Institute for Civil Justice. 

Before joining the Rutgers faculty, Professor Noll was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School. He clerked for Judges Pierre N. Leval and Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Judge Richard J. Holwell on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.