Nestor M. Davidson

Nestor M. Davidson is Professor of Real Estate (effective July 1, 2025).  His scholarship and teaching explore a set of related questions around transactional dynamics in real estate as well as regulatory frameworks for real estate markets.  Those questions include doctrinal and legal-structural concerns in affordable housing and fair housing, property theory and the constitutional dimensions of property law, and legal determinants of the built environment. He also has distinguished himself in the field of urban law, exploring undertheorized constitutional and administrative dimensions of urban governance, the role of law in city life, and critical fault-lines in the legal relationship between states and local governments.

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.  Among the books he has co-authored or co-edited are Law and the New Urban Agenda (Routledge 2020); The New Preemption Reader (West 2019); The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of the Sharing Economy (Cambridge University Press 2018); Law Between Buildings: Emergent Global Perspectives on Urban Law (Routledge 2017); and Affordable Housing and Public-Private Partnerships (Ashgate 2009). He current book project, Cities in Law: Urbanism as a Legal Phenomenon, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Professor Davidson previously practiced commercial real estate law at Latham & Watkins LLP, working on the real estate aspects of corporate mergers and acquisitions, real estate private equity, and international project finance, as well as large-scale development, land-use, and planning projects, with a particular focus on affordable multifamily housing investment, syndication, development, and compliance. He twice served at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, first as Special Counsel and later as Principal Deputy General Counsel, working across the agency’s portfolio from housing finance to community development to fair housing.

Professor Davidson also spent six years on the Board of the New York State Housing Finance Agency, one of the largest housing bond agencies in the country, and most recently chaired as a mayoral appointee the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, a body charged with setting rent guidelines for the city’s stock of nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments.

Professor Davidson comes to Harvard from Fordham Law School, where he was the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law and founder/director of the Urban Law Center. He earned his AB from Harvard College and JD from Columbia Law School. After law school, he clerked for Judge David S. Tatel on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court of the United States.