10 Dec 2019
Professor Jessica Shoemaker’s article Transforming Property: Reclaiming Indigenous Land Tenures, has been published in Volume 105 of the California Law Review.
This article is the culmination of many years of work on Indigenous land tenure challenges in the United States. After several prior articles trying to build a deeper understanding of the challenges of modern reservation property systems, this article looks to the future. In Transforming Property, Professor Shoemaker posit a novel view of property law as an adaptive, dynamic system that is full of transformative potential, and charts a series of specific strategies tribal governments could choose to pursue in order to unlock this potential and rebuild new Indigenous land tenure systems from the ground up.
Professor Shoemaker focuses her research at the intersection of property, law, and community economic development, with particular attention to land use challenges on modern rural landscapes and Native American reservations in the United States. During the 2018-2019 academic year, Professor Shoemaker served as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Legal and Resource Rights at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law in Edmonton, Canada.