Jessica A. Shoemaker

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.

Watch how Professor Shoemaker is defining a rural landscape through property law. 

• Native American Law Law 796/G (3 cr hr)
  Investigation of the federal statutory, decisional, and constitutional law that shapes the interactions of Indian tribes, the states, and the federal government. The course includes an overview of the history of federal Indian policy and emphasizes the unique legal principles that inform the modern federal trust responsibility, tribal sovereignty, and complex civil and criminal jurisdictional issues that arise in Indian Country. Current topics including tribal water rights, tribal justice systems, reservation economic development, and tribal religious rights will also be addressed. Students who have previously taken Native American Law Seminar (Law 797) may not enroll in this course.
• Property I & II Law 505/G & 506/G (6 cr hr; 3 each semester)
  Depending upon the section, the course may include problems in possession, gifts of personal property, bona fide purchasers of personal property including recording and priorities, estates in land, landlord and tenant, the modern land transaction, controlling the use of land, easements, licenses and equitable servitudes and constitutional limitations on the power of government to restrict individual economic liberties.
• Rural Development & Energy Law Seminar Law 706 (3 cr hr)
  This course will cover specific laws and regulations, as well as business and policy considerations, that inform efforts to develop rural infrastructure, stimulate jobs, establish community-based financial and non-profit institutions, and encourage rural entrepreneurship. Particular emphasis will be placed on how energy law and policy may be shaping the rural future. This course will also include a comparative element, with literature from the Law and Development movement, international development, and the affordable housing and urban renewal contexts considered in conjunction with current rural development concerns.
• Selected Topics in Property and Natural Resources Law Law 779/G (3 cr)
  This seminar covers advanced topics in property and natural resources law. Students will consider legal and interdisciplinary approaches to solving some of our most pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges. Representative topics, subject to instructor discretion, will consider how property and natural resource laws relate to modern food systems, energy infrastructure, housing provision, climate change, public land access and management, and further issues of environmental, economic, and racial justice. Students will complete a significant writing requirement. In Spring 2023, the seminar topic was Agriculture, Race and Connections to Place (description at https://www.ruralreconcile.org/new-course-spring-2023).
• Wills and Trusts Law 639/G (3 cr hr)
  Intestate succession and related matters, execution of wills, revocation of wills, problems created by the time gap in wills, limitations on the power to devise, construction of wills (mistake and ambiguity), "living wills", durable powers of attorney, health care directives, the elements of trust, formalities in the creation of a trust, the interest of the beneficiary, charitable trusts and problems of trust administration.