Speakers

Gregory Ablavsky is the Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a professor, by courtesy, in Stanford’s history department. Professor Ablavsky’s scholarship focuses on early American legal history, particularly on issues of sovereignty, territory and property in the early American West.  His publications explore a range of topics, including the history of the Indian Commerce Clause, the importance of Indian affairs in shaping the U.S. Constitution, and the balance of power between states and the federal government. His book Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press.  His work has received the Cromwell Article Prize and the Kathryn T. Preyer Prize from the American Society for Legal History.

Prior to joining the Stanford Law faculty in 2015, Professor Ablavsky was the Sharswood Fellow in Law and History at the University of Pennsylvania.  He clerked for Judge Anthony Scirica of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was also a law clerk for the Native American Rights Fund in Washington, D.C.

Ablavsky earned his bachelor of arts degree in history from Yale University and his juris doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

A fourth-year doctorate candidate in history at Stanford University, W. Tanner Allread studies 19th-century Native American history and the history of Federal Indian Law.

His dissertation focuses on constitutionalism and state-building in the Cherokee, Muscogee and Choctaw Nations prior to removal and the development of the concept of tribal sovereignty in American law.

In addition to his historical work, Tanner – a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma – has assisted Native peoples and tribes with numerous legal matters, working for Oklahoma Indian Legal Services, the law firm of Kanji & Katzen, P.L.L.C., and the Yurok Tribe’s Office of the Tribal Attorney.

Allread holds a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University and a juris doctorate from Stanford Law School.

Daniel Carpenter is the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and chair of the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Carpenter graduated from Georgetown University with distinction in Honors Government and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago.

He is the author of Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021), a study of petitioning in North American political development, which was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association.  His other books on American politics and political history include Reputation and Power: Organizational image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA and The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928.  At Harvard, he has led the creation of the Digital Archive of Antislavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions and the Digital Archive of Native American Petitions.

Carpenter is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2007-2008) and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2003-2004), as well as an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.  

Kristen Carpenter is Council Tree Professor of Law and director of the American Indian Law Program at the University of Colorado Law School.

Carpenter served as a member of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples from 2017-2021. While serving at the United Nations, she worked on human rights issues regarding Indigenous Peoples in all regions of the world.

With colleagues at the Native American Rights Fund, Carpenter is now co-lead on “The Implementation Project,” an effort to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the United States. She also serves as a justice of the Shawnee Tribe Supreme Court.

Carpenter teaches and writes in the fields of human rights and Indigenous Peoples law, with emphasis on rights to land, culture, and religion. She is the author of dozens of academic articles and several books on these topics.

She works frequently with Indigenous Peoples as well as museums and universities, national and local governments, and private industry to help to advance understanding of Indigenous Peoples’ rights. She has delivered keynote addresses to corporations throughout the United States and to entities around the globe.

Carpenter has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

She received her bachelor of arts degree cum laude from Dartmouth College and her juris doctor cum laude from Harvard Law School.

Bonnie Cherry is a doctoral degree candidate in jurisprudence and social policy at Berkeley Law studying extraordinary use of Native lands in times of “national emergency.” She is interested in how this extraordinary use is legally facilitated by premises that undergird U.S. Federal Indian Law, and the role of sovereign Tribal nations in either facilitating or resisting it. Her research also explores how extraordinary security measures against Native people and lands became embedded in administrative law and organizational practice.

Cherry’s research is funded by the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, and she is an Empirical Legal Scholars Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley Law.

Cherry is a Mike Synar Research Fellow at the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, a John L. Simpson Research Fellow in International and Area Studies, and a Berkeley Empirical Legal Scholars Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at Berkeley Law.  She is the recipient of the Berkeley Mentored Research Award and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.

Burke A. Hendrix is a professor of political science at the University of Oregon.  He works in the area of political theory, with a special focus on Native American political claims.  He is the author of two books, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims (2008) and Strategies of Justice: Aboriginal Peoples, Persistent Injustice, and the Ethics of Political Action (2019), and the co-editor of Colonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized (2017).  He is currently at work on two teaching-related volumes examining Native American responses to political ideas associated with the expansion of the United States.

Hendrix also has interests in global justice and just war theory, along non-Western political theory, conservatism and basic normative methodologies.  He earned his bachelor of arts degree in political science and history from Linfield College and both his master of arts and doctoral degrees in political science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, Yunpoví (Tewa: Willow Flower), an assistant professor of law at Stanford Law School, 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.

Hidalgo 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. Her scholarship on tribal law, constitutional law, popular sovereignty and voting rights law has been published in Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Cardozo Law Review and Houston Law Review.

Prior to joining Stanford Law School, she served as the Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago. She previously 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.

Hidalgo 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.

Hidalgo 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.

She earned her bachelor of arts degree in political science with a concentration in Native American studies from Yale University, her master of philosophy degree in political thought and intellectual history from Cambridge University and her juris doctorate from Harvard Law School.

Professor Alex Pearl is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. He is a nationally recognized scholar in the fields of water law, climate change law and policy, and federal Indian law. His research focuses both on distinct concepts within these fields as well as intersectional issues that cross legal fields and social dynamics.  

 Professor Pearl obtained his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley—School of Law. While at Berkeley Law, he was a research assistant for the late esteemed scholar of federal Indian law, Professor Philip Frickey. After graduation, clerked for the Honorable William J. Holloway Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and then worked as an associate at Kilpatrick Townsend in Washington, D.C., where he exclusively represented Indian tribes and individual Indians. 

Pearl joined the OU Law faculty in 2020. At OU he is affiliate faculty in the Department of Native American Studies as well as with the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center. For the previous six years, he was a member of the faculty at Texas Tech University School of Law, where he was the director of the Center for Water Law and Policy and affiliate faculty with the Texas Tech Climate Science Center.

Samuel Piccolo will receive his doctorate in political science from the University of Notre Dame in the spring and begin his teaching career this fall as an assistant professor of political science at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota.

His articles are published or forthcoming in venues including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Security Studies, and Papers on Language and Literature. His current book project is tentatively titled, From Athens to Turtle Island: Native American and Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy, Politics, and Constitutionalism.

Piccolo holds a bachelor of arts degree in international political economy from Brock University in Canada and a master of arts degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Professor Lindsay G. Robertson, J.D., Ph.D. (History), is a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and the 2022-23 Indigenous Center Visiting Professor and Senior Visiting Scholar at UC College of the Law, San Francisco.  He served as Private Sector Advisor to the U.S. Department of State delegations to the Working Groups on the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples from 2004-06, and the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples from 2004-07, and from 2010-12 he was a member of the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Law. 

In 2014, he served as advisor on indigenous peoples law to the Chair of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and in 2016 he was named the first Chickasaw Nation Endowed Chair in Native American Law at the OU College of Law.  

He has spoken widely on international and comparative indigenous peoples law issues in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia.  An elected member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Foundation, he serves as a justice on the Supreme Court of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes and as Senior Legal Adviser to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Robertson is the author of Conquest by Law (Oxford University Press 2005), the first comprehensive history of the case of Johnson v. M'Intosh.

Kevin Washburn is the dean of the University of Iowa College of Law and an expert on federal Indian criminal justice in Indian country. A leading proponent of tribal self-governance in the area of criminal justice, he helped draft the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010 and testified in Congress in support of it. His work also has supported tribal jurisdictional provisions in the Violence Against Woman Act.

Prior to becoming a law professor, Washburn served as a federal prosecutor in Indian country –land that is located within the exterior boundaries of an Indian reservation is Indian country – a trial attorney in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as the general counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. 

More recently, he served during the second term of the Obama-Biden Administration as the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Washburn is a member of the Chickasaw Nation and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in economics from the University of Oklahoma before earning his law degree from Yale Law School.

Craig Yirush is a historian of Anglo-American political and legal thought. His first book, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire (Cambridge, 2011) explored the colonial origins of American political theory, with a focus on the role that arguments for dispossession played in the colonists' case for autonomy in the empire (and, ultimately, for independence).

Yirush is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Chief Princes and Owners of All, on how indigenous people used the law to resist settler colonialism in the Anglo-American world from contact to the early 20^th century. Parts of this project have been published in Law and History Review, Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire and Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America.

He is also the co-editor (with Jack Greene) of the three-volume Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution (Liberty Fund, 2018), which won an award for ‘Outstanding Academic Title’ from Choice magazine in 2019.

At UCLA, Yirush offers lecture courses on the American colonies and the American Revolution, as well as graduate and undergraduate seminars on a variety of aspects of the early modern Atlantic world from constitutionalism to indigenous rights, to Loyalism, to the historiography of the American Revolution.  

Yirus earned his bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in history from the University of British Columbia, his master of philosophy degree in political thought and intellectual history from Cambridge University and his doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University.