Nancy Costello

Nancy Costello is the Director, First Amendment Law Clinic and Director of the McLellan Free Speech Online Library. (www.mclellan.law.msu.edu)
Professor Costello teaches Research, Writing and Advocacy from an Intellectual Property Law Perspective and teaches student clinicians in the MSU First Amendment Law Clinic. She has also taught Media Law, Copyright Law, and Intellectual Property in the Internet Age. Before joining the law college she practiced in the area of commercial litigation, defamation law, ebusiness law and collections litigation for the law firm of Dickinson Wright PLLC in Detroit. She received her bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law where she served as an editor of the Law Review and president of the Women's Law Caucus.

Before becoming an attorney, Professor Costello worked for 15 years as a journalist writing for the Detroit Free Press, the Associated Press, the Harvard University News Office, and news organizations in Seattle, Massachusetts, Ohio and New Hampshire. As a newspaper reporter she covered the Michigan state Legislature, former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicides, the assimilation of Southeast Asian refugees, 'Northern Exposure' doctors in the Alaskan outback, and the advent of Gorbachev's 'Perestroika' in the former Soviet Union.