Terence J. Centner Lecturer
Professor Centner joined the law faculty in 2019. His research focuses on the agricultural-environmental interface looking at current issues from a scientific and legal perspective. He has published more than 160 scientific papers and law review articles, and has lectured in 50 countries around the world. He has also published four books: Empty Pastures; Blame Culture; Environmental Law and the Protection of People; and Consumers, Meat and Animal Products.
Prior to joining the Law College faculty, Professor Centner practiced law in New York state, clerked at the Fifth District Court of Appeal in Florida, and taught at the University of Georgia. During his tenure at Georgia, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung research scholar at the University of Göttingen (Germany), Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Mannheim (Germany), Professor at the University of New Orleans Innsbruck Summer School (Austria), Fulbright-Scotland Visiting Professor at the University of Aberdeen (UK), and lecturer at the University of Lucerne (Switzerland).
Professor Centner served as president of the American Agricultural Law Association and received the association’s Distinguished Service Award. Under the auspices of Great Plains AG*IDEA, an interactive distance education alliance, he helped develop an online agricultural law certificate. In 2015, he was awarded the Food and Agricultural Sciences Excellence in University Teaching Award by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Anthony Schutz Associate Dean for Faculty & Marvin and Virginia Schmid Foundation Professor of Agricultural Law
Professor Schutz has been with the law school for nearly all of the last 20 years, beginning in 2000. During law school, he worked for Cline, Williams, Wright, Johnson, and Oldfather in Lincoln, Nebraska, and was editor-in-chief of the Nebraska Law Review. He graduated in 2003 with the highest distinction and clerked for the Honorable C. Arlen Beam of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit until 2005. During the 2004-2005 academic year he also taught Legal Research and Writing at the College of Law as an adjunct instructor. During the 2005-2006 academic year he was a Visiting Lecturer in the Lawyering Program at the Cornell Law School. He came back and began teaching here in 2006. Since then, he has taught courses in Agricultural Law, Environmental Law, Water Law, Land Use Regulation, State and Local Government Law, and Contracts. He is currently serving as the Associate Dean for Faculty, which he began in 2020. He is the faculty advisor for the Agricultural and Environmental Law Society, moot court, and Nebraska Connections. The latter role is related to the Rural Law Opportunities Program, which Professor Schutz also leads.
The product of a farm family in Elwood, Nebraska, Professor Schutz's research interests include the often intertwined subjects of agricultural law, environmental and natural resources law, and state and local government, all of which have significant impacts on rural landscapes and populations. Professor Schutz has served as the chair of the AALS Section on Agricultural Law, is active in the American Agricultural Law Association and the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, and is a frequent lecturer on agricultural and water law issues regionally and nationally. He tries to keep a close eye on the legislature and encourages students to speak up and take part in the legislative process, both while they are here and in their professional lives going forward.
Professor Schutz has three daughters, Ani, Berlyn, and Celia. His Partner, Joni, and her three children, Abbie, Collin, and Cian, complete a Brady Bunch mixed family (without the Alice, which is much more difficult). From time to time, Professor Schutz finds his sanity by running. He's completed many marathons and a few ultra-marathons, trying to keep up with Joni.
Watch to see how Professor Schutz's research explores the statutory power given to NRDs in the state of Nebraska.
Jessica A. Shoemaker Steinhart Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law
Jessica Shoemaker joined the law faculty in 2012 and is currently Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law. She has been recognized both nationally and internationally for her work on adaptive change in pluralistic land-tenure systems, as well as property law’s power to shape the contours of human communities and natural environments. Her work focuses specifically on issues of racial justice and agricultural sustainability in the American countryside and on systems of Indigenous land tenure and land governance in the United States and Canada. Her most recent law-review articles, including Re-Placing Property, Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes and Race, and Transforming Property: Reclaiming Modern Indigenous Land Tenures, have been placed in top journals, including the University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review and the California Law Review. Her work has been reviewed four times in JOTWELL, an online journal that highlights important and notable recent legal scholarship, and she is cited widely by interdisciplinary and international scholars.
Beginning in Fall 2021, Professor Shoemaker has been awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to analyze how property law has shaped who owns agricultural land in America and why, as well as what might come next. From 2018-2019, she also served as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Legal and Resource Rights at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Edmonton, Alberta.
Prior to becoming a legal scholar, Professor Shoemaker worked as an agricultural writer, a VISTA volunteer, a rural community outreach worker, and a public-interest attorney for diverse, smallholder farmers across the United States as a Skadden Fellow with Farmers’ Legal Action Group, Inc. During her Skadden Fellowship, Professor Shoemaker focused particularly on access and equity issues for BIPOC farmers and ranchers and on strategies for community ownership of new renewable energy developments. Professor Shoemaker also clerked for the Honorable David M. Ebel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and has experience interning for both the Crow Nation Court of Appeals and Indian Probate Judge George Tah-Bone with the Department of the Interior, helping with federal probate proceedings across reservations in North and South Dakota. As a practicing litigator for five years at Arnold & Porter LLP in Denver, Colorado, Professor Shoemaker has also worked on all aspects of complex litigation in several different courts, including amicus work before the United States Supreme Court and significant roles in several important cases involving Indigenous land and religious rights. Professor Shoemaker graduated first in her class from the University of Wisconsin Law School.
At Nebraska, Professor Shoemaker teaches Property I and II, Native American Law, Wills and Trusts, and a seminar in rural development and energy law. She has supervised numerous law student externships, including student opportunities with tribal governments and the Center for Rural Affairs. She also advises the College’s Equal Justice Society.
She is a Founding Fellow of the Rural Futures Institute, a Fellow and former Governor of the Center for Great Plains Studies, and the current Program Chair for the Association of Law, Property, and Society. A product of a chore farm in Iowa and generations of Wisconsin farmers who grew everything from strawberries to ginseng, she is also currently working to establish and co-direct The Rural Reconciliation Project at the University of Nebraska.