About

Scott Altman is the Virginia S. and Fred H. Bice Professor of Law at USC Gould School of Law. He is an expert in jurisprudence, property, and family law, and teaches courses including Family Law, Property, Jurisprudence, and Community Property. Altman joined the USC Gould faculty in 1988 and has served as associate dean from 1995 to 2006 and as vice dean from 2007 to 2016. His recent research focuses on child custody and divorce issues, with publications addressing topics such as judicial candor, commodification, coercion, blackmail, threats to litigate child custody, and equality norms applied to child custody. He earned his BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his JD cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as developments chair for the Harvard Law Review. Altman clerked for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1987 to 1988 and has been a faculty member at USC Law since 1988.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Social psychology
• Law and economics
• Public relations
• Economics

Selected publications

• Steering, Subversion, and Rights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Intimate Vulnerability: Love, Loss, & the Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hiring and Firing Based on Political Views

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Steering, Subversion, and Parents' Rights

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Discrimination-Free Zones and Free-to-Discriminate Zones: Where Should Discrimination Laws Apply?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Discrimination-Free Zones and Free-to-Discriminate Zones: Where Should Discrimination Laws Apply?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• If Your Morals Make You Discriminate at Work, Change Jobs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Are Parents Fiduciaries?

  Law and Philosophy · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Law
  PublisherDOI

• A Right to Adopt and Parental Licensing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Selling Silence: The Morality of Sexual Harassment <scp>NDA</scp>s

  Journal of Applied Philosophy · 2022 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Criminology

  ABSTRACT This article argues against enforcing sexual harassment nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Although NDAs guard privacy, facilitate settlement, and compensate victims, they also help repeat perpetrators avoid detection and punishment, endangering future victims and undermining efforts to combat sexual harassment. Advocates argue that victims have no duty to prevent these harms, given the risks and trauma of reporting. I offer three responses. First, although most victims have no duty to speak, some victims might come to have such a duty. The state should not help them commit to violating a future duty. Second, some initially reticent victims may later want to disclose. The state should not enforce promises not to do supererogatory acts. Third, NDAs make victims complicit with the perpetrator's future harassment and wrongful efforts to avoid social punishment. If perpetrators refuse to compensate victims adequately without NDAs, we should increase victim compensation rather than enforce NDAs. Accused harassers might claim they need NDAs to guard against wrongful or excessive social punishment. For guilty perpetrators, NDAs resemble felony expungement statutes. However, arguments for expungement do not apply to NDAs. Although falsely accused people have legitimate privacy interests, NDAs are an excessively broad way to protect this interest.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sam Durrance

  1 shared

• Bruce S Eisenhart

  1 shared

• John-David Bartoe

  1 shared

• Winston Scott

  1 shared

• Steve Robinson

  University of North Carolina Wilmington

  1 shared

• Paul Johnson

  Institute for Fiscal Studies

  1 shared

• Susan E. Sharp

  Florida International University

  1 shared