Sponsored by the AALS Section’s on: Associate Deans for Academic Affairs and Reasearch, Critical Theories, Leadership, New Law Professors, Pro Bono & Access to Justice, Professional Responsibility, and Women in Legal Education
Indigenous nations and their citizens have a unique relationship with the United States and its legal system. From having their rights adjudicated by the “Courts of the conqueror,” to the overarching plenary power exercised by the U.S. Congress, to the negotiation of treaties with a president often deemed the “great white father,” the American rule of law and role of lawyers in upholding it have significantly and disparately impacted Indigenous sovereignty and individual rights. A modern renaissance of that sovereignty and the expanding study and understanding of the role it has played in shaping the nation’s structures of power is now beginning to reshape how the law and lawyers should view Indigenous rights in relation to law, justice, and the legal profession. This panel centers the rights of Indigenous nations and their citizens to consider what the American rule of law has meant and how the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty is fundamentally changing those historical (mis-)conceptions.
Maggie Blackhawk, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Sovereignty Project, New York University School of Law
Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is a professor of law at NYU Law and an award-winning interdisciplinary scholar and teacher of constitutional law, federal Indian law, and legislation. Blackhawk was awarded the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize and her research has been published or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Supreme Court Review, and Cambridge University Press. Her recent projects examine the ways that American democracy can and should empower minorities, especially outside of traditional rights and courts-based frameworks. She also studies how the political agency of marginalized communities has shaped American democracy historically and how those communities have leveraged the law to redistribute power. She is particularly interested in how law can structure institutions in ways that empower minorities to govern and engage in lawmaking—petitioning, lobbying, federalism, etc.—and how empowering minorities could be harnessed to better mitigate constitutional failures, like colonialism and slavery.
Nazune Menka, Assistant Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Northwest Center for Indigenous Law, Seattle University School of Law
Professor Menka is a Denaakk’e (Koyukon Athabaskan) and Lumbee Assistant Professor of Law who teaches and writes about Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations, constitutional law, legal history, property law, and environmental law and policy. Her scholarship and research aim to support the self-determination of Native Nations, and Indigenous Peoples forcibly removed to, or otherwise incorporated within, what is now known as the United States. By building coalitions, legitimating a plurality of worldviews, and increasing self-determination for Native Nations, peoples, and communities, Professor Menka believes a more just and equitable society is possible. She currently serves as the Faculty Director for the Northwest Center for Indigenous Law at Seattle University School of Law.
Before joining SU Law, Professor Menka served as the Executive Director of the Center for Indigenous Law & Justice at Berkeley Law. Prior to serving as Executive Director, Professor Menka served in several capacities at Berkeley Law including in the Environmental Law Clinic as a Supervising Attorney, as a Lecturer, and as the Tribal Cultural Resources Project Policy Fellow. While at UC Berkeley Professor Menka also created and taught a popular new undergraduate Legal Studies course, Decolonizing UC Berkeley. Prior to her legal career, Professor Menka completed her M.S. in Soil, Water, and Environmental Science on the health impacts of arsenic and lead from abandoned mining sites utilizing aqueous bench chemistry, x-ray fluorescence, and other particle accelerator methodologies.
Professor Menka values public service and has served as Board Treasurer for several non-profit organizations, including, the California Indian Law Association, the Water Protector Legal Collective, and the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science. She has worked on policy issues in the Alaska and Hawaii state legislatures and has completed various intern and management programs including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources. She is a member of the State Bar of Michigan.
Monte Mills, Charles I. Stone Professor of Law and the Director of the Native American Law Center (NALC), University of Washington School of Law
Monte Mills joined the UW faculty in 2022 as Charles I. Stone Professor of Law and the Director of the Native American Law Center (NALC). He teaches American Indian Law, Property, and other classes focused on Native American and natural resources related topics.
Monte’s research and writing focuses on the intersection of Federal Indian Law, Tribal sovereignty, and natural resources as well as race and racism in the law and legal education. He served as an Executive Editor on the 2024 edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law and serves as a co-author on two textbooks: American Indian Law, Cases and Commentary (along with Robert T. Anderson, Sarah A. Krakoff, and Kevin K. Washburn) and Native American Natural Resources Law (with Michael Blumm and Elizabeth Kronk Warner). Monte also co-authored A Third Way: Decolonizing the Laws of Indigenous Cultural Protection, which was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2020. Monte’s legal scholarship and other written work has also appeared in the Natural Resources Law Journal, the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, Environmental Law, High Country News, the American Indian Law Journal, the Public Land and Resources Law Review, and The Conversation, among other forums.
Prior to joining the faculty at UW, Monte was a member of the faculty at the Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana. Before that, Monte was the Director of the Legal Department for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe in Colorado, an in-house counsel department that he helped organize and implement in 2005 following completion of a unique two-year in-house attorney training program. As Director of the Tribe’s Legal Department, Monte represented and counseled the Tribe on a broad array of issues, including litigation in tribal, state, and federal courts, legislative matters before the Colorado General Assembly and the United States Congress, and internal tribal matters such as contracting, code-drafting, and gaming issues.
Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, Assistant Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, Yunpoví (Tewa: Willow Flower) is a scholar of American Indian tribal law, federal Indian law, and constitutional law focusing on the intersection of identity, race, citizenship, and government structure. Her scholarship examines the way government structures, citizen identity, and the history that is taught in schools, can impact the rights and powers of oppressed racial minorities within American law.
Professor Reese is a nationally recognized expert on tribal law and federal Indian law and frequent media commentator on developments within the doctrine, particularly at the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Reese is also a prominent Native policy expert and advocate. From 2023-2024, she served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Native Affairs at the White House, working within the Domestic Policy Council. In that role, she advised President Biden on all matters involving Tribal Nations and coordinated, spearheaded, or shaped Native policy development across federal agencies. Reese oversaw the Administration’s preparations for the Supreme Court’s decision in Brackeen v. Haaland, assisted with the designation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument, advised the President on supporting the Haudenosaunee Nationals Lacrosse Team’s participation in the Olympics, and helped develop and shape Executive Order 14112: Reforming Federal Funding and Support for Tribal Nations To Better Embrace Our Trust Responsibilities and Promote the Next Era of Tribal Self-Determination.
Prior to joining SLS, she served as the Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago. Previously, Professor Reese worked at the National Congress of American Indians where she supported tribal governments across the country as they implemented expanded criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians under the 2013 Violence Against Women Act. Her comprehensive five-year report on the tribal prosecutions thus far—which documented not only outcomes and unforeseen complications but the surge of tribal law innovation brought on by expanded jurisdiction—has been widely cited everywhere from Congress to Supreme Court briefs. Reese began her legal career as a civil rights litigator at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund where she led a desegregation case in one of the largest school districts in Florida and worked on the challenge to Alabama’s Voter ID law.
Reese served as a law clerk to Judge Diane Wood on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Judge Amul Thapar on the Eastern District of Kentucky Court (now the Sixth Circuit). She also was a fellow at the Senate Judiciary Committee, and at the U.S. Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division’s Appellate Section.
