Bethany Berger

Wallace Stevens Professor of Law

University of Connecticut School of Law

Bethany Berger

Wallace Stevens Professor of Law

University of Connecticut School of Law

Professor Bethany Berger is a widely read scholar of Property Law and Legal History and one of the leading federal Indian Law scholars in the country.  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, and co-author of leading casebooks in both Property Law and American Indian Law.  Her articles have appeared in the Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and the Duke Law Journal, among other publications, and have been excerpted and discussed in many casebooks and edited collections as well as in briefs to the Supreme Court and testimony before Congress.

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 Nations 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.

At the University of Connecticut School of Law, Professor Berger teaches American Indian Law, Property, Tribal Law, and Conflict of Laws.  She is also the Wallace Stevens Professor of Law, a chair named for one of America’s greatest poets, a lawyer who lived and worked in Hartford for most of his life.  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.

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Contributions

Deep Dive Episode 59 – Cedar Point Nursery v. Shiroma

June 17, 2019

A recent Ninth Circuit decision held that a California regulation allowing labor organizers to spend time on an employer’s property for the purpose of soliciting union membership did not count as a ‘physical taking’ under the 5th Amendment. Wen Fa and Bethany Berger discuss the implications of this decision.

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