Law professor Jessica A. Shoemaker will discuss the centuries-long struggle for land justice in rural America during her Nebraska Lecture Nov. 12. 

Shoemaker, Steinhart Foundation Professor of Law, will speak at 3:30 p.m. in the Nebraska Union’s Swanson Auditorium. Shoemaker’s lecture, “Ground Rules: How Property Makes the Countryside,” is part of Nebraska Research Days. 

The event is free and open to the public. A live webstream will be available on the Nebraska Lectures website. 

“The struggle for land justice has endured for centuries, with private property sometimes misunderstood as a static set of allocated rights,” Shoemaker said. “But, property law is a dynamic and pluralistic system built by ongoing human choices.  

“At the birth of this country, America offered individual homesteaders property rights to instill a particular agrarian vision. Those rights, however, were built on other property sacrifices, including Indigenous dispossession and slavery,” Shoemaker continued. “Today, we continue to make property choices that profoundly shape how we inhabit our shared landscape.” 

Shoemaker said her lecture will explore how these choices “shape the contours of rural lives and livelihoods in often invisible ways” – for example, who gets to farm and in what way. Property laws also shape ongoing societal conflicts about housing access, energy transmission, and responding to a changing climate.

Building on a series of case studies from land reform in Scotland to the claims of Indigenous protesters opposing construction of underground pipelines in North America, Shoemaker’s lecture will examine research on adaptive property-system change in the U.S. and abroad, focusing on the many ways this focus on property law can lead toward a more prosperous and sustainable future for all.   

Shoemaker’s lecture will include a question-and-answer session, followed by a reception.

Shoemaker, who joined the law faculty in 2012, is recognized internationally for her work on adaptive change in pluralistic land-tenure systems, as well as property law’s power to shape human communities and natural environments. In 2021, she was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and in 2018-19 she served as the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Legal and Resource Rights at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Shoemaker currently is working to establish The Rural Reconciliation Project at UNL.  

The Nebraska Lectures are offered twice a year and feature high-profile presentations by distinguished Husker faculty who address topics of broad interest in an engaging, accessible format. Archived videos from each lecture, are available on the event website.     

The Nebraska Lectures: The Chancellor’s Distinguished Speaker Series is sponsored by the Research Council, Office of the Chancellor, Office of Research and Innovation and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.     

Research Days