Jessica A. Shoemaker is professor of law at the University of Nebraska College of Law. Her work emphasizes the power of property law to shape human communities and natural environments, with particular focus on issues of racial and environmental justice in the American countryside, and the adaptive potential of modern Indigenous land tenure systems in North America. Her recent law review articles include “Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes and Race” (2021) and “Transforming Property: Reclaiming Modern Indigenous Land Tenures” (2019). From 2018 to 2019, she was the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Legal and Resource Rights at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law.
Before becoming a legal scholar, Shoemaker was an agricultural writer, a rural community organizer, a judicial clerk, and a public-interest attorney working for diverse smallholder farmers as a Skadden Fellow with a national nonprofit law firm. She grew up doing farm chores in Iowa and descends from generations of Wisconsin farmers who grew everything from strawberries to ginseng. Shoemaker is currently working to establish and codirect The Rural Reconciliation Project at the University of Nebraska, an interdisciplinary initiative aimed at bridging the rural-urban divide and reimagining what sustainable rural futures can be.
Her project, “Remaking a Land of Opportunity: America’s Rural Future,” analyzes property law’s role in shaping who owns agricultural land in America and why. The project will combine the stories of farmers and activists on the ground with several concrete law-reform examples to investigate whether a more inclusive and sustainable agricultural land tenure system is possible.
