Professor Nestor M. Davidson is one of the country’s leading scholars in real estate, housing, the built environment, and related areas of property and law.  He is also a pioneer in the field of urban law, exploring the legal dimensions of urban governance, the role of law in city life, and the state-local constitutional relationship. Over the past two decades, Professor Davidson has published widely in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal. Professor Davidson has also co-edited numerous books, including Affordable Housing and Public-Private Partnerships; Law Between Buildings: Emergent Global Perspectives on Urban Law; Law and the New Urban Agenda; and The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of the Sharing Economy, as well as co-authoring casebooks and treatises on property and state and local government law. He is currently writing a book entitled Cities in Law: Urbanism as a Legal Phenomenon (Cambridge University Press) (forthcoming).

Professor Davidson earned his AB from Harvard College and JD from Columbia Law School. After law school, he clerked for Judge David Tatel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court of the United States.  Professor Davidson then served as Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), working on the entire range of the agency’s mission. 

After HUD, Professor Davidson practiced commercial real estate at the firm of Latham and Watkins, LLP.  That work included the real estate aspects of corporate mergers and acquisitions, private equity, and international project finance, as well as large-scale development, land-use, and planning projects. Throughout, his practice focused on affordable multifamily housing investment, syndication, development, and compliance.

Professor Davidson started his academic career at the University of Colorado Law School in 2004.  In 2011, he joined the faculty at Fordham Law School and was named the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law in 2017. At Fordham, Professor Davidson founded and serves as faculty director of the Urban Law Center, exploring the role of law in the governance and built environment of contemporary cities, and launched the Association for Urban Law Scholars (AULS), a global network of legal academics focusing on cities.

Professor Davidson has continued to engage with real estate, housing, and the built environment across his career.  In Colorado, he worked with a public housing agency and a leading housing nonprofit.  From 2009 through 2010, he rejoined HUD as Principal Deputy General Counsel, the second-ranking attorney in the agency. More recently, Professor Davidson served for six years on the board of the New York State Housing Finance Agency, one of the largest housing bond agencies in the country, and is currently Chair of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, an administrative body charged with setting annual rent guidelines for the city’s stock of nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments.