Fernanda is a Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law, American University as well as the Director of the International Organizations Law and Development Program. Her research and teaching interests are in European Union Law, Constitutional Law, Comparative Law and Local Government Law.

She received her PhD from Trento University and her SJD degree from Harvard Law School where she was the recipient of the Mancini Prize in European Law, and the Justice Welfare and Economics fellowship at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Professor Nicola is a member of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) and was the AALS Chair of the EU law and Comparative law Sections. In 2017 she was a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and a Visiting Professor at LUISS in Rome. She moderated the keynote the Luxembourg forum at AUWCL that is the official visit of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) to the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C.

Professor Nicola is the author of several articles on transnational legal theory and European integration including Invisible Cities in EU Law (2012), New Approaches to Regulatory Cooperation: The Politicization of Legal Expertise in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) Negotiation (2015); National Legal Traditions at Work in the Jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (2016); Legal Diplomacy Against Authoritarianism (2020); with Oreste Pollicino, The Balkanization of Data Privacy Regulation (2020); with Gino Scaccia, The Italian Model to Fight Covid-19: Regional Cooperation and the Cost of One-Size- Fits-All Lockdown Measures (2020). She co-edited two volumes on the Court of Justice of the European Union, with Cambridge University Press: with Bill Davies entitled EU law Stories: Contextual and Critical Histories in European Jurisprudence (2017) and with Mikael-Rask Madsen and Antoine Vauchez, Researching the European Court of Justice: Methodological Shifts and Law’s Embeddedness (2020).

Education

S.J.D., Harvard Law School 2009 (S.J.D.)
Ph.D., Trento University, Italy 2006
LL.M., Harvard Law School 2002
Law Degree, University of Turin 2000 (Laurea in Legge (Law Degree))
B.A., University of Turin 1996 (Laurea in Scienze Politiche)