In a recent Nebraska Lecture, Law Professor Jessica A. Shoemaker described how property law has shaped America from its beginnings, with a unique history balancing ideals of individual freedom with a complex history of dispossession. Throughout history, land has proven essential for building lives and communities, with property law emerging from social and political struggle, she says. Thougt American property law broke from the feudal power structure that governed land ownership in Europe, American traditions also were built on sacrifices of slavery and indigenous dispossession. Property law is entwined with concepts such as individual freedom, independence, privacy and freedom from interference.
Bio
Jessica Shoemaker has been recognized nationally and internationally for her expertise on pluralistic land-tenure systems and property law's power to shape human communities and natural environments. She focuses specifically on racial justice and agricultural sustainability in the American countryside and on systems of indigenous land tenure and land governance in the United States and Canada. In 2021, Shoemaker was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to analyze how property law shapes ownership of agricultural land in America. Before becoming a legal scholar, Shoemaker worked as an agricultural writer, a VISTA volunteer, a rural community outreach worker and a public-interest attorney for diverse, smallholder farmers as a Skadden Fellow with Farmers' Legal Action Group, Inc. (Updated November 2024.)