Property in the Pandemic

Prof. Marc Lane Roark is the Louisiana Outside Counsel of Health and Ethics Endowed Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Native American Law and Policy Institute, a think-tank dedicated to policies relating to Native American tribes in the U.S. and first nations in Canada. A member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Professor Roark has worked with tribes and tribal organizations thinking about commercial law problems and their intersection with tribal sovereignty.  

Professor Roark’s research primarily considers how narratives and norms are scaled in Property conflicts around housing. Together with Lorna Fox O’Mahony (University of Essex) he is the author of Squatting and the State: Resilient Property Theory in an Age of Crisis.  His primary areas of work are in the study of housing and homelessness through the lens of property norms.  Professor Roark has published 26 articles in U.S. and international law journals, including: Homelessness at the Cathedral (2015) 80 Missouri L. Rev. 53; Human Impact Statements (2015) 54 Washburn L. J. 649; Under-propertied Persons,  26 Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 1 (2017); and Scaling Commercial Law in Indian Country, 8 Texas A&M L. Rev. 89 (2020). In Scaling Commercial law in Indian Country, Roark describes how resources, tribal structures, and uniform legal processes influence adoption of secured finance legislation on Indian tribes. His work was the basis of the first economic impact study of secured transactions laws on Indian tribes (See Dippel, Frye, Feir, and Roark, Secured Transactions Laws and Economic Development on American Indian Reservations, 111 AEA Papers and Proceedings 1 (2021). He is currently working on several projects focused on resilience gaps and resilient property theory applied across numerous areas, including housing, ruralism, Indian law, and commercial law.