Pepperdine Law Review Sorenson Spotlight Series: Nancy Hunt

The Pepperdine Law Review is proud to present the Sorenson Spotlight, a series showcasing our past Sorenson Writing Award recipients. The Ronald M. Sorenson Memorial Writing Award is presented each year to a member of the law review who submits the most well-written, thoroughly researched, and intellectually engaging comment or note. The Sorenson Spotlight Series features our many outstanding award recipients and highlights what they are doing now.

To begin the series, we are excited to feature professor Nancy Hunt. Professor Hunt is a former Pepperdine Law Review editor-in-chief and Sorenson Award Winner who began her career with a federal clerkship before transitioning into private practice in mortgage-banking litigation. In 2010, Professor Hunt fulfilled her dream of teaching law, and she is now an Associate Professor of Law and Practice at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. She is also the director of the Washington, D.C., Externship Semester Program—a program she proposed, designed, and developed—which combines the practical experience of working in externships in our nation’s capital with doctrinal and writing classes that complement that experience, providing students a holistic education in how federal law is formed, influenced, challenged, and upheld. Professor Hunt’s areas of specialty and teaching include administrative law, constitutional law, complex litigation, the legislative process, and advanced legal writing.

Hunt received the Sorenson Award for her article, “Political Question or Judicial Query: An Examination of the Modern Doctrine and Its Inapplicability to Human Rights Mass Tort Litigation,” which was published in Volume 28, Issue 4 of the Pepperdine Law Review. Since publishing the article, Professor Hunt has also published a textbook entitled “Lawyering in the Nation’s Capital” (West Academic 2018), which examines attorneys' roles within the three branches of government and highlights constitutional questions and power struggles among the branches that go to the heart of our system of government.

In giving advice to current and future law students, Professor Hunt says to “do all the work of law school (the messy, in-the-weeds work of untangling difficult arguments and lines of reasoning in cases), because then you'll learn more than just the black letter law—you’ll learn how to be a lawyer.”

The Pepperdine Law Review thanks Professor Hunt for all of her continued contributions to Pepperdine's legal community.

The article “Political Question or Judicial Query: An Examination of the Modern Doctrine and Its Inapplicability to Human Rights Mass Tort Litigation" may be found at Pepperdine Law Review