Bethany Berger

Professor Bethany Berger teaches and writes about Federal Indian Law, Tribal Law, and Property.  She is a co-author and member of the Editorial Board of Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the foundational treatise in the field, co-author of a casebook, American Indian Law: Cases and Commentary, with Robert Anderson, Philip Frickey, and Sarah Krakoff, and will join Joseph Singer as a co-author of the next edition of Property Law: Rules, Policies, and Practices.  Her articles have appeared in the Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and the Duke Law Journal, and have been excerpted and discussed in many casebooks and edited collections, as well as in congressional testimony and in briefs to the Supreme Court.

Professor Berger graduated with honors from Wesleyan University, where she was elected to phi beta kappa, and from Yale Law School.  After law school, Professor Berger went to the Navajo and Hopi reservations to serve as the Director of the Native American Youth Law Project of DNA-People's Legal Services.  There, she conducted litigation challenging discrimination against Indian children, drafted and secured the passage of tribal laws affecting children, and helped to create a Navajo alternative to detention program.  She then became Managing Attorney of Advocates for Children of New York, where she worked on impact litigation and policy reform concerning the rights of children in public education.   She has served as a judge for the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals and as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan Law School.

Representative Publications

American Indian Law Cases and Materials (with Robert Anderson, Philip Frickey & Sarah Krakoff (West 1st ed 2008, 2d. ed. 2010)

Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Co-Author and Editor) (2012 ed., 2005 ed., 2007 & 2009 supp.)

Williams v. Lee and the Debate Over Indian Equality, 109 Mich. L. Rev. 1463 (2011)

Reconciling Equal Protection and Federal Indian Law, 98 Cal. L. Rev. 1165 (2010)

What Owners Want and Governments Do: Evidence from the Oregon Experiment, 78 Fordham Law Review 1281 (2009)

Red: Racism and the American Indian, 56 UCLA L. Rev. 591 (2009)

It’s Not About the Fox: The Untold History of Pierson v. Post, 55 Duke L. J. 1089 (2006) (discussed in Jesse Dukeminier et al., Property (Aspen 7th ed. 2010); Thomas W. Merrill & Henry E. Smith, Property: Policies and Principles (2007); Joseph William Singer, Property: Rules, Policies and Practices (5^th Ed. 2010); James Charles Smith & John Copeland Nagle, Property: Cases and Materials (2008))

Justice and the Outsider: Jurisdiction Over Nonmembers in Tribal Legal Systems; 37 Ariz. St. L. J. 1047 (2005) (selected for the 2005 Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, reprinted in the materials for the Federal Bar Association Indian Law Section Annual Conference, and cited in congressional testimony and briefs to the Supreme Court)

"Power Over This Unfortunate Race": Race Power and Indian Law in U.S. v. Rogers, 45 William & Mary Law Review 1967 (2004)

After Pocahontas: Indian Women and the Law, 1830-1934, 21 Am. Ind. Law Rev. 1 (1997) (reprinted in part in Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (Angela Harris et al. eds., 2000), Gender and the Law: Cases and Materials (Katherine Bartlett et al. eds., 2002), Mixed Race America and the Law (Kevin Johnson ed., 2003), and Race Law: Cases, Commentary and Questions (Michael F. Higginbotham ed. 2005))