About the Instructors

Edward (Ted) Boling is Deputy Solicitor for Land Resources at the U.S. Department of the Interior, where he supervises the work of the Solicitor’s Office on land management planning and renewable energy development.  Ted joined the Department in August of 2010, as Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, after ten years at the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).  Ted served as CEQ General Counsel beginning in January of 2008 and assumed the position of Senior Counsel in September of 2009 after the Senate confirmation of CEQ’s Deputy Director and General Counsel.  He went to CEQ as Deputy General Counsel in August of 2000 from the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he was a senior trial attorney. Ted joined the Department of Justice in 1990 through the Attorney General’s Honor Program.  At the Department of Justice he was a trial attorney in three Sections of the Division:  Law and Policy, Wildlife and Marine Resources, and Natural Resources. He also served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the criminal prosecution program of the Eastern District of Virginia.  His trial and appellate litigation experience concentrated on cases involving the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Federal land management statutes.  From the Fall of 1996 through the Spring of 1998, Ted worked for the Department of the Interior as Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. 

Ted is a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth, Ninth and Tenth Circuits, and the Virginia State Bar.  He has served on the Board of the Virginia State Bar Association’s Environmental Law Section, which he chaired in 2000-01.  He is also a member of the American Bar Association’s Section on Environment, Energy, and Resources.

Ted graduated from Washington University School of Law in 1990, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law (now the Journal of Law & Policy) and represented his law school in national moot court competition.  He received his B.A. in 1986 from Mary Washington College, where he majored in political science. 

Dr. Gavin Clarkson is an associate professor at the University of Houston Law Center, where he conducts research in two distinct areas: intellectual property management and tribal economic development, including tribal access to capital markets and the determinants of success for tribal entrepreneurship. An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Dr. Clarkson has consulted, written, and published extensively on tribal sovereignty, tribal governance and court systems, tribal economic development, and tribal asset management. He was also a contributing author for the most recent edition of Felix Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law. In 2005, Dr. Clarkson received the first ever grant from the National Science Foundation to study the dynamics of tribal finance, and in May 2006 he testified before the Senate Finance Committee regarding his research.

Dr. Clarkson holds a bachelor's degree and MBA from Rice University, a doctorate from the Harvard Business School in Technology and Operations Management, and is a cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School, where he was the managing editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and president of the Native American Law Students Association. 

Professor Gordon is the Associate Law Librarian for Public Services in the Jameson Law Library at The University of Montana. She teaches several courses: Legal Research, Advanced Legal Research, Environmental Law Research, International Law Research and Animal Law. During the summer session, Professor Gordon teaches Indian Law Research as part of the University's Summer Indian Law Program. Professor Gordon is a frequent CLE presenter on the topic of electronic legal research. Her book, Online Legal Research: A Guide to Legal Research Services and Other Internet Tools, was published in 2003 by William. S. Hein & Co. Her scholarship focuses on legal research and aspects of teaching legal research. She is currently researching and writing about an animal law issue involving the Montana Constitution. She is the advisor of the law school's new chapter of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund.

Professor Gordon is a graduate of Eastern Washington University, the University of Washington School of Library and Information Science, and The University of Montana School of Law, where she was a member of the Jessup International Moot Court team and served as business editor of the Public Lands and Resources Law Review. Before coming here, she was the Library Director at Salish Kootenai College.

In addition to her work in the law school, Professor Gordon serves on The University of Montana Faculty Senate and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Senate. She is the President of the Missoula Public Library Foundation Board of Directors. Her pro bono and volunteer work focuses on assisting pro se litigants with family law issues and consulting on animal law issues. She is also a HOPE foster parent for the Humane Society of Western Montana and always has a house full of animals in need of permanent homes.

Patrice H. Kunesh, of Standing Rock Lakota descent, is the Deputy Solicitor for Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior, where she supervises the work of the Solicitor’s Office on a breadth of matters concerning American Indian tribes and individual Indians, Indian lands, and Indian gaming.  Before joining the Department, she was a member of the faculty of the University of South Dakota School of Law where, since 2005, she taught in the areas of Federal Indian Law, Legislation, Property Law, and Children & the Law.  She also directed the University’s Institute of American Indian Studies.  In 2009, Kunesh pursued a Masters of Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University through a Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship. She also has taught at Lewis & Clark College of Law.

Kunesh began her legal career at the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) as a Skadden Public Interest Fellow and then as a Staff Attorney, where she litigated cases involving tribal sovereignty and natural resources and provided legal and policy advice to tribes on a wide variety of Indian law and tribal governance issues.  In 1995 she became in-house counsel to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut, where she continued her legal and policy work in the areas of child welfare, development of tribal law and governance, and economic development.

She is a 1989 graduate of the University of Colorado School of Law, where she was an editor of the Colorado Law Review.  Kunesh has published several articles and papers on Indian child welfare, tribal law and governance, and economic development.

Melissa Schlichting is a staff attorney at the National Indian Gaming Commission. She has more than 10 years of legal experience representing Indian tribes and tribal organizations in California and Montana. Ms. Schlichting worked in private practice in California, representing both gaming and non-gaming tribes, before join the NIGC. While in private practice, she also represented tribes in traditional loan and bond financing transactions. She is a graduate of the University of Montana School of Law, a member of the California and Montana state bars, the Crow Tribal Court, all federal courts in the states of California and Montana, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court.

Angela Riley is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and Director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.  She is also the Director of UCLA's J.D./M.A. joint degree program in Law and American Indian Studies.  Her research focuses on issues related to indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance.  Her work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Washington Law Review and others.  She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma and her law degree from Harvard Law School.
 
After clerking for Chief Judge T. Kern of the Northern District of Oklahoma, she worked as a litigator at Quinn Emanuel in Los Angeles, specializing in intellectual property litigation.  In 2003 she was selected to serve on her tribe’s Supreme Court, becoming the first woman and youngest Justice of the Supreme Court of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma.  In 2010, she was elected as Chief Justice.  She was recently appointed to serve on the United Nations - Indigenous Peoples’ Partnership Policy Board, which is a commitment to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and calls for its full realization through the mobilization of financial and technical assistance.  She is also an Evidentiary Hearing Officer for the Morongo Band of Mission Indians.

Melissa Tatum is a Research Professor and Associate Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law & Policy Program at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law. She has also taught at Michigan State University College of Law, Wayne State University Law School, and the University of Tulsa College of Law. While at the University of Tulsa, she directed or co-directed the Native American Law Center, LL.M. program in American Indian and Indigenous Law, and Dublin study abroad program. In addition to teaching, Professor Tatum has served as a judge in the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals. She is also currently a consultant for the New Mexico Attorney General's Office Taskforce on Enforcement of Protection Orders.