Faculty Spotlight Nate Ela

Nate Ela is an assistant professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law, where he teaches courses on constitutional law and land use. He studies human social behavior through a lens of law, including how democracy works and how cities rebound from adversity.

“Law as a social practice”

Prior to law school, Ela taught English in Mozambique as part of the Peace Corps. In the wake of September 11, 2001 and the presidential administration of George W. Bush, he decided to go to law school because he was interested in both foreign policy and holding people in power to account.

During law school and as a clinical fellow afterward, he worked on international human rights cases, but found there was a gap in his knowledge base. “I spent one of my summers in the Philippines, interviewing people who had been part of one of these landmark human rights cases against Ferdinand Marcos after he stopped being President of the Philippines and I realized that as much as I was interested in learning how to practice human rights law, I was just as interested in figuring out what are people’s motivations and their understanding of the contradictions of putting law to use in this particular way,” he recalls. “I realized that as much as I had learned in law school, it didn’t give me the tools to think about law as a social practice.”

As a result, Ela went on to earn a master’s degree and a PhD in sociology.

Currently, there are two focuses of Ela’s scholarship: the law of democracy, and urban resilience, which looks at how cities bounce back during times of crisis.

For example, Ela explains that fusion voting permits candidates to appear on the ballot for more than one party. In 2022, he was part of a group of lawyers and law professors representing the New Jersey Moderate Party in its effort to nominate United States Representative Tom Malinowski. Malinowski was the incumbent and the Democratic candidate. The Moderate Party nomination would have meant that he would be listed on the ballot under two different parties, which New Jersey law does not allow.

Under the current laws of many states prohibiting fusion voting, voters often see third-party candidates as “throw away” votes or spoilers to major party bids. Fusion voting, Ela explains, would allow voters to signal to candidates their desire to move toward a particular set of policies, whether those are centrist, progressive, or conservative—or some new package of ideas. “The basic slogan is more voices, more choices, and more responsible party government,” he says.

Ela is also studying resilience in American cities in the climate change crisis. He is tracing a century of social-scientific studies of cities as ecological systems, and comparing how different ways of thinking about what a city is shapes ideas of how cities should be governed. He is in the process of visiting cities to speak with policy entrepreneurs and others about climate change initiatives.

From the Ivy League to growing vegetables

Finally, Ela is working on a book on property and urban agriculture. The book will focus on farming and gardening in Chicago from the Progressive Era through the present, explaining how the practice serves to redistribute resources and, under the right conditions, can help empower residents.

But Ela isn’t just interested in learning from the history books. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he took a job at a farm outside Philadelphia, in part because he was interested in local sustainable food policies. He recalls spending his time “growing vegetables and fixing machines. It wasn’t very much about policy; it was more about learning how to grow food.”

“I’m not just interested in what the doctrine is, but what the impacts are on the ground and how, in any particular area of law – whether it’s property law or Constitutional law – [there] is something that … you can see in the books and you can see in action.”

Nate Ela