Overview

Professor Bethany Berger is a widely read scholar of Federal Indian Law, Property, and Legal History. 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. Since 2016, she has co-authored nine amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, including one cited by the majority in McGirt v. Oklahoma.  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.

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.

Her papers are availabe online via SRRN. 

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Research areas

• Property
• Federal Indian Law
• Citizenship and Race
• Legal History

Teaching areas

• Property, Federal Indian Law, Land Use

Professional affiliations and memberships

• Admitted to practice in the State of New York; State of Arizona (inactive); U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; U.S. District Courts for the Eastern District of New York, Southern District of New York, and District of Arizona; Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe
• Iowa State Bar Association
• American Law Institute

Awards and honors

• 2024 Perry Zirkel Teaching Award (at UConn Law)
• 2014 Election to the American Law Institute
• 2005 Selection for the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum