Founded in 2012, the Urban Law Center at Fordham Law School seeks to investigate and improve the role of the law and legal systems in contemporary urbanism. It promotes an interdisciplinary understanding of the legal, governance, and regulatory aspects of urban environments by advancing collaborative research and scholarship, organizing local and global convenings, and supporting knowledge sharing, career pathways and pedagogy in the world of urban law. In particular, the Center’s efforts focus on forces that shape urban inequality and urban innovation, targeting the most pressing issues facing our nation’s cities and their metropolitan regions.
Shelia R. Foster, Georgetown Law School
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Sheila R. Foster is a Professor of Law and Public Policy (joint appointment with the McCourt School). Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a University Professor and the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law at Fordham University. She also co-directed the Fordham Urban Law Center and was a founder of the Fordham University Urban Consortium. She served as Associate Dean and then Vice Dean at Fordham Law School from 2008-2014. Prior to joining Fordham, she was a Professor of Law at the Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.
Professor Foster writes in the areas of environmental law and justice, urban land use law and policy, and state and local government. Her most recent work explores questions of urban law and governance through the lens of the “commons” exemplified by her article The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review (2016) and forthcoming MIT Press Book, The Co-City.
Professor Foster has been involved on many levels with urban policy. She currently is the chair of the advisory committee of the Global Parliament of Mayors, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Urban Innovation Working Group, an advisory board member of the Marron Institute for Urban Management at NYU, and sits on the New York City Panel on Climate Change.As co-director with Christian Iaione of the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (LabGov), she is currently engaged in the “Co-Cities Project,” an applied research project on public policies and local projects from over 100 cities around the world.
