Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, Yunpoví (Willow Flower), is a nationally recognized scholar of American Indian tribal law, federal Indian law, and U.S. constitutional law, as well as a tribally enrolled citizen of Nambé Pueblo. She served as Senior Policy Advisor for Native Affairs at the White House Domestic Policy Council, where she advised President Biden and helped shape tribal policy. Her legal career includes litigating civil rights cases at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, supporting tribal governments at the National Congress of American Indians, and clerking in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. A graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard Law School, Professor Reese now teaches at Stanford Law School. As both a policy advisor and scholar, Professor Reese brings a distinctive perspective to questions of tribal sovereignty, civil rights, and constitutional law. Her work offers critical insights into federal Indian law and the legal frameworks that govern the relationship between tribal nations and the United States. In this interview, Professor Reese and the HULR discuss the exclusion of tribal nations from American legal structures, the development of tribal representation, and the broader possibilities for building a more inclusive vision of American democracy.

Professor Eva Micheler is a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Economics in Vienna. She specialises in corporate law, securities regulation, and the evolving legal challenges posed by financial technology. Particularly, Professor Micheler focuses on blockchain and distributed ledger technology, which is the focus of this interview. In recent years, Professor Micheler’s research has probed the legal implications of blockchain-based systems for securities markets and corporate governance. Her work critically examines how traditional legal concepts such as ownership, property rights, and intermediated holdings are challenged and transformed by the rise of decentralized technologies, which underpin cryptocurrency. She has raised important questions about the adequacy of existing private law frameworks to support innovations, such as tokenized assets and decentralized finance.

In this interview, Professor Micheler and the HULR discussed the effect of cryptocurrency on areas of private law such as property law, securities law, and corporate law in Europe and how this impact will likely develop in the coming years.

Sidney Chalhoub is the David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard College, where he has taught for the past decade. Previously, he spent thirty years teaching at the University of Campinas in Brazil. Chalhoub’s work focuses on 19th and early-20th-century Brazil, particularly the history of slavery, labor, and public health. This interview discusses how Chalhoub approaches social history by drawing upon legal archives and sources. 

Professor Carmel Shachar is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Health Law and Policy Clinic at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. Her work focuses on some of the most pressing issues in healthcare today — from expanding access to care for vulnerable and underserved populations to leveraging telehealth and digital health tools to improve patient outcomes. She also studies the application of public health ethics to real-world challenges.