Nausica Palazzo
Associate Professor
Nausica Palazzo works in the areas of family law and constitutional law as an Associate Professor at NOVA School of Law, and Director of the NOVA Centre for the Study of Gender, Family and the Law.
She holds a law degree from Bocconi University, an LL.M. from the University of Michigan School of Law, and obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Law, cum laude, from the University of Trento, with a thesis on the legal recognition of non-traditional families in Canada, the United States and Europe. She received six fellowships and grants to complete her dissertation, including a Fulbright Fellowship and Michigan Grotius Fellowship. She has received several awards for her work, including the Fulbright 75th Anniversary Award, which is given to Fulbright alumni who have made significant contributions to U.S.-Italian relations, and the Young Leader Academy Fellowship for the 2023-2025 term, which was awarded by the EUTOPIA University Alliance.
In 2023, Nausica was a visiting professor at Reichman University, in Herzliya, and in 2024, a visiting professor (JG McLeod Professor in Family Law) at Western Law, London, Ontario. Prior to joining NOVA, Nausica was an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Law at Bocconi University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has held visiting positions at the European University Institute and McGill University.
She is especially interested in queer approaches to family law, critical approaches to anti-discrimination law and theory, comparative constitutional law, and the relationship between gender and religious norms in illiberal regimes. Nausica has published articles in these areas in top journals such as the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law (article reviewed in Jotwell), the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, Law & Ethics on Human Rights, and The Review of Faith & International Affairs.
Her latest book, Legal Recognition of Non-Conjugal Families, came out in February 2021 with Hart Publishing, and a co-edited collection on queer and religious alliances in family law was published in Anthem Press’s Law and Society Series in 2022 (with J.A. Redding). Nausica was recently invited to author a “Principles of Non-Marriage Law” for the “Principles of” Series at Edward Elgar (with A. Hayward).