Nicole researches and publishes in the areas of wild law/Earth jurisprudence and interdisciplinary climate studies encompassing climate litigation, climate activism and climate fiction.

From 2014 to 2017, she instigated and co-led the Wild Law Judgment project. She is co-editor of Law as if Earth Really Mattered: the Wild Law Judgment Project (Routledge, 2017). Her 2019 Routledge monograph, Law, Fiction and Activism in a Time of Climate Change, has been shortlisted for the 2020 Hart-SLSA book prize.

In 2019, Nicole played an advisory role, and acted as an expert witness, in the trial of Greg Rolles in the Bowen Magistrates Court; this was the first attempt by a climate activist to use the extraordinary emergency defence in the Queensland Criminal Code.