2025 Lecture - Maggie Blackhawk

Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) is professor of law at NYU and a prize-winning scholar and teacher of federal Indian law, constitutional 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, Supreme Court Review, American Historical Review, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and Journal of Politics. Much of her scholarship explores the relationship between law and power, with a particular emphasis on the ways that subordinated peoples leverage law to shift power to their communities—especially outside of rights and courts-based frameworks. Her recent projects have focused on the laws and legal histories of American colonialism and the central role of the American colonial project, including the resistance and advocacy of Native and other colonized peoples, in shaping the constitutional law and history of the United States.

She also writes about her research for general audiences, most recently in the New York Times, and serves as an academic consultant to a range of public education projects focused on the First Amendment, the history of Congress, and Native peoples--including the Obama Presidential Center, documentarian Ken Burns, the National Constitution Center’s First Amendment exhibit, and Crystal Bridges. Her empirical projects have been supported by the American Political Science Association, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, among others.

Her first book project highlights the centrality of Native Nations, Native peoples, and American colonialism to the constitutional law and constitutional history of the United States. The manuscript builds upon her Harvard Law Review article, Federal Indian Law as Paradigm within Public Law, and aims to bring the study of American colonialism and Native peoples to the fore in broader discussions of American public law.

She is currently co-editing a volume for the Tobin Project’s Institutions of Democracy Initiative on Rethinking the History of American Democracy and she also serves as an executive editor for Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (forthcoming 2024). She was elected to serve on the Board of Directors for the American Society for Legal History and was named a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States.

Before coming to NYU, she served as professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania where she was awarded the Harvey Levin Award for Excellence in Teaching by a majority vote of the graduating class of 2021. She was also elected and served a term as President of the AALS section on Legislation and Law of the Political Process and was appointed Senior Constitutional Advisor to the President of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. Before entering the legal academy, she practiced union-side labor law at Bredhoff & Kaiser in Washington, D.C., and clerked for Judge Susan Graber of the Ninth Circuit and Chief Judge James Ware of the Northern District of California.