Ezra Rosser

American University Washington D.C. | AU · Washington College of Law

The Poverty Law Canon takes readers into the lives of the clients and lawyers who brought critical poverty law cases in the United States. These cases involved attempts to establish the right to basic necessities, as well as efforts to ensure dignified treatment of welfare recipients and to halt administrative attacks on federal program benefit lev...

The emerging progressive property school of thought champions and finds its meaning in the social nature of property. Rejecting the idea that exclusion lies at the core of property law, progressive property scholars call for a reconsideration of the relationships owners and non-owners have with property and with each other. Despite these ambitions,...

The market now offers consumers an expanding array of options to offset the harms of their consumption. Travel websites and politicians alike sell the advantages of carbon offsetting. But offsetting options need not be limited to correcting for environmental harm; consumption is also associated with worker exploitation and people struggling with po...

Legal and environmental concerns related to Indian law and tribal lands remain an understudied branch of both indigenous law and environmental law. Native American tribes have a far more complex relationship with the environment than is captured by the stereotype of Indians as environmental stewards. Meaningful tribal sovereignty requires that non-...

Displacing the Judiciary: Customary Law and the Threat of a Defensive Tribal Council is a brief article framed as a book review of RAYMOND D. AUSTIN, NAVAJO COURTS AND NAVAJO COMMON LAW: A TRADITION OF TRIBAL SELF-GOVERNANCE (2009). Raymond Austin is a former Justice of the Navajo Supreme Court and his book is an important contribution to Indian la...

This Article examines the relationship between individual consumption and consumption-based harms by focusing on the rise in consumption offsetting. Carbon offsets are but the leading edge of a rise in consumer options for offsetting externalities associated with consumption. Moving from examples of quasi offsetting to environmental offsetting and...

Remittances are a significant source of income for many families in Latin America and are worthy of close attention by those who care about food security in the region. This brief article explores the complicated relationship between remittances, food intake among recipient families, and food security.

This chapter uses the disastrous allotment experience of Indian tribes to question the transformative power of land-titling for the poor as advocated by Hernando de Soto. For Indians, allotment era land-titling resulted in loss of land and hardship, all reflective of non-Indian desires for the land and an unwillingness to acknowledge the rights of...

This Article uses the Navajo Nation’s proposal to develop a coal-fired power plant to explore the economic, social, and regulatory challenges of Indian nations pursuing environmentally destructive forms of economic development. After presenting the heavy hand non-Indians have historically played when it comes to natural resource extraction on the N...

The author offers a brief parody article about law reviews, socio-economic class, cheese, and the legal professoriate.

Rather than having the exclusive U.S.-tribal relationship respected, Indian nations are wrongly forced to deal with state governments that are often hostile to Indian interests. This is the provocative thesis of Forced Federalism. For the last 20 years, from 1988 to the present, tribes have been increasingly seen as emerging contenders vying for re...

Two Indians refuse to move until their complaints are heard. Stoically they stand. Waiting. Eventually a staffer promises them a meeting. This image of stoic and mostly silent Indians formed a mini-drama on the TV-show The West Wing. The treatment of Indian issues on HBO’s The Sopranos was similarly curt: sitting out on the curb, mobsters complain...

Remittances, the sending of money from immigrants back to their home countries, are the newest anti-poverty, development activity of the poor to be applauded by international institutions and economists. Exceeding foreign aid and private investment to many developing countries, remittances are being hailed as a new, untapped resource with powerful...

Frequently referred to as customary law, the unique traditions and customs of different Native American tribes are cited by their tribal courts as authoritative and binding law. The recent use of customary law as a mechanism for deciding individual cases is not uniform among tribal court systems as it differs depending upon which tribe's judges are...

This Article is an exploration of remittances, the sending of money from immigrants back to their home countries. The Article begins by linking remittances to the excitement and acclaim that micro-lending and land-titling have received. Remittances, as the newest promising anti-poverty, development activity of the poor to be applauded by internatio...

This brief article explores the purported requirement that delegates to the U.S. Congress be state representatives, using the Cherokee Nation's treaty-based right to a Congressional Delegate to question assumptions that statehood is or has ever been a requirement for such representation

This short article argues that tribal governments considering entering into cooperative agreements with federal, state, or local governments ought to maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the non-tribal governments sitting across from them at the negotiating table and the appropriateness of entering into cooperative agreements.

This paper argues that tribes and scholars need to come to grips with the trade-off between trust and self-determination, and that failure to do so-by for example expressing a yearning that the trust doctrine was stronger-will lead to poor choices by tribes. Choices thus need to be based on an understanding of this trade-off and tribes must be awar...

This paper presents the current land regime and nature of economic development found on most Native American reservations, drawing predominantly from the Navajo Nation. It then considers the situation according to (1) neo-classical economics and (2) New Institutional Economics (NIE). The paper begins with the paired assumptions that economic growth...

This essay explores how we get to know the poor, focusing on the poor voices literature of academics and international institutions. I first examine the challenge of avoiding tokenism while still providing context in portrayals of the poor. The essay then highlights the distance between the poor and the non-poor, showing how this separation, when c...

About the book: Legal and environmental concerns related to Indian law and tribal lands remain an understudied branch of both indigenous law and environmental law. Native American tribes have a far more complex relationship with the environment than is captured by the stereotype of Indians as environmental stewards. Meaningful tribal sovereignty re...

This paper explores the history and present day implications of the Cherokee Nation's 1835 treaty-based right to a Congressional Delegate.

Little attention is paid to the nature of the high incomes of the rich or to the legal or norm-based obligations the rich owe society. This popular and scholarly inattention reflects the general acceptance of the idea that the rich have earned their high incomes and owe society little. By looking at income equations revealing society's role in high...

The article is an in-depth exploration of the impacts of an Indian tribe's decision to pursue an environmentally destructive form of economic development. The history of Navajo Nation's coal leasing provides the background for the tribe's recent proposal to build a coal-fired power plant and the controversies surrounding the proposal and the enviro...

This article is an exploration of the assumption, last made by the U.S. Supreme Court in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, that non-Indian property owners are harmed by Indian acquisition and control of land. Accepting for the moment the Court's prioritization of a non-Indian perspective, the article explores (a) what lies behin...

Professor Philip Frickey's insightful (Native) American Exceptionalism in Federal Public Law eloquently calls upon the Court to reject the siren of seeming coherence; yet his academic tour de force ironically rests upon the same false synthesis and simplification of the varied tribal experiences into a shared set of digestible legal categories. The...

This paper focuses on the relationship between rural housing and building codes. The paper covers the relationship between the existing urban based literature on housing conditions and the rural housing situation as well as a theoretical exploration of different ways of understanding value in housing. Finally, two rural case studies - the Navajo Na...