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Bethany Berger

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. Professor Berger has also taught as an Assistant Professor at Wayne State Law School, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa and at the Pre-Law Summer Institute for Native students in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is visiting at Harvard Law School as the Oneida Nation Visiting Professor of Law during the 2008-2009 academic year.

Professor Berger is a judge with the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals, and past chair of the Indian Nations and Indigenous People's Section of the American Association of Law Schools. She is an Executive Editor and Co-Author of Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the preeminent treatise in the field, and is currently working on a casebook in Federal Indian Law with Robert Anderson, Philip Frickey, and Sarah Krakoff. Some of her scholarly articles include Red: Racism and the American Indian, 56 UCLA L. Rev. (forthcoming 2009); It's Not About the Fox: The Untold History of Pierson v. Post, 55 Duke L. J. 1089 (2006); Justice and the Outsider: Jurisdiction Over Nonmembers in Tribal Legal Systems; 37 Ariz. St. L. Rev. 1035 (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), and 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)).

Recent Courses

• Property II (Spring 2008)
• Conflict Of Laws (Fall 2007)
• Property I (Fall 2007)
• American Indian Law (Spring 2007)
• Property (Spring 2007)
• Conflict Of Laws (Fall 2006)