Sheila R. Foster is a Professor of Law and Public Policy (joint appointment with McCourt School of Public Policy) at Georgetown University. She joined Georgetown after many years at Fordham University where she was University Professor and Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law. At Fordham, she also was the Co-Director of the Fordham Urban Law Center and founder of the university-wide Fordham Urban Consortium. She served as Associate Dean and then Vice Dean of 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 is the author of numerous books, book chapters, and law journal articles on property, land use, environmental law, and antidiscrimination law. Much of her early work was dedicated to exploring the intersection of civil rights and environmental law, in a field called “environmental justice.” She is the coauthor (with Luke Cole) of one of the field’s leading texts, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (N.Y.U. Press), and coeditor of the 2nd edition of The Law of Environmental Justice (with Michael Gerrard 2008). Over the last two decades, she has worked with state, federal and local agencies on environmental policy. Professor Foster serves on the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) investigating the relationship between climate change and inequality at the neighborhood level.
Her most recent work explores the emerging concept of the “urban commons” and related property, land use and urban governance issues at the local and metropolitan level. Here work in this area includes The City as a Commons (Yale Journal of Law and Policy 2016) (with Christian Iaione) and Collective Action and the Urban Commons (Notre Dame Law Review 2011), which was voted one of the 5 best (out of 100) articles on land use published that year.
Professor Foster is also the coauthor (with David Oppenheimer and Sora Han) of a groundbreaking casebook, Comparative Equality and Antidiscrimination Law: Cases, Codes, Constitutions and Commentary (Foundation Press). This casebook examines the development of laws around the world grappling with social inequality based on human differences. She has taught and conducted research internationally in Africa, Switzerland, Italy, France, England, Austria, Colombia, Panama, and Cuba.
Professor Foster received her B.A. in English, with honors, from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her J.D. in from Berkeley Law at the University of California. After law school, she was an attorney with Morrison and Foerster in San Francisco.
View all posts by Sheila Foster →
It’s December 12, 2035. I woke up in my apartment, in the middle of the city and there was a mountain. Yes, a mountain with a forest, greenery everywhere. I opened the windows and I could listen to the birds singing. I could smell the moist ground, the same smell...
There is a close relationship between the three Es―economy, employment, and environment. Economic growth and jobs rely heavily on environmental resources, but a myopic focus on either of these aspects often results in environmental degradation. Green jobs have been seen as a way to buffer the adverse effects of economic...
In a world where every route is optimized, where algorithms predict our movements, and speed becomes an unassailable norm, the detour stands out as an act of resistance. It is the assertion of reclaimed freedom, a refusal of systematic efficiency that reduces our experience of the world to a digital...
Serina Fast Horse and Toby Query met as employees at the City of Portland in 2018 while working on an innovative project that centered Indigenous voices and perspectives. This project, Shwah kuk wetlands (which means frog in Chinuk Wawa, a local indigenous trade language) intertwines Indigenous (or relational) and Western...
What does the more-than-human city look like? Ferne Edwards, Barcelona Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Girona Ida Nilstad Pettersen, Trondheim Lily Fillwalk, New Brunswick Audax M. Gawler, Victoria İdil Gaziulusoy, Espoo Giulia Gualtieri, Almere Gloria Lauterbach, Espoo Saba Mirzahosseini, Turin Clare Qualmann, London Trophica Lab, Bogotá D.C. Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, Basel
0 Comment(s) Join our Conversation
Places, much like nature, are in a constant state of change. This is especially true for Rocinha, Brazil’s most populous favela, home to approximately 200,000 people. Perched on steep hillsides in Rio de Janeiro’s Southern Zone, Rocinha is a vibrant, multi-layered community where life unfolds within a dense network of...
Biodiversity has always been important to environmental scientists, conservationists, landscape architects, and others but only recently seems to have entered the public domain. It took a long time for Australia to accept the climate emergency. It is pleasing to see that the biodiversity crisis has been accepted more readily. There...
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that 19 to 23 million tonnes of plastic waste end up in lakes, rivers, and seas annually[1]. This staggering number highlights the urgent need to tackle plastic pollution. The growing production of waste, inadequate disposal methods, and the slow degradation of plastics significantly...
The EU Nature Restoration Law is here. Do we have what it takes to make it work? Bettina Wilk, Bilbao John Warren Tamor, Bonn Evelyn Underwood, Brussels Laure-Lou Tremblay, Brussels Ferenc Albert Szigeti, Budapest Adeline Rochet, Brussels Martin Grisel, The Hague Federica Risi, The Hague Silvia Quarta, Murcia Christos Papachristou, Dublin Anne-Sophie Mulier, Brussels Shane McGuinness, Dublin Goksen Sahin, Brussels Philipp LaHaela-Walter, Freiburg Gitty Korsuize, Utrecht Valerie Kapos, Cambridge Chris McOwen, Cambridge John Tayleur, Cambridge Opi Outhwaite, Cambridge Niki Frantzeskaki, Utrecht João Dinis, Cascais City Marta Delas, Madrid Jordi Cortina-Segarra, Alicante Humberto Delgado Rosa, Brussels Roby Biwer, Luxembourg Marta Mansanet Cánovas, Luxembourg Heather Brooks, Brussels Carlo Calfapietra, Porano Chiara Baldacchini, Viterbo Bogdan Micu, Bucharest Liviu Bailesteanu, Bucharest
0 Comment(s) Join our Conversation
7 January 2025
The Power of Care for Climate Justice Praneeta Mudaliar, Mississauga Lilian Dart, Mississauga Dannia Eyelli Philipp Gutierrez, Toronto Celina Mankarios, Mississauga
Commoning and climate justice The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Canada is bustling with youth-based climate action and advocacy. From bringing lawsuits against governments to advocating for fossil fuel divestment and spreading awareness about intersecting crises such as housing insecurity and climate impacts, young people are emerging as powerful voices...
Cities are, at their best, collaborative masterpieces, aren’t they? They emerge from the interplay of diverse professions, ways of knowing, modes of action, governments, and, most importantly, the people who call them home. They are cultural, ecological, human, and non-human. Together (ideally), these forces shape cities based on shared—and sometimes...
Love, a complex and profoundly influential emotion, has been widely explored in a variety of academic fields including sociology, psychology, anthropology, as well as human and physical geography. In geography, love is explored in several ways, including love of place and of nature (tophilia and biophilia) (see Tuan, 1974 and...
The UK’s new Labour-led government has pledged to tackle the country’s long-standing housing crisis head-on, with a bold promise to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the next five years. This plan comes in response to the mounting pressures of soaring demand, limited housing supply, and ever-increasing prices that have...
Each time our editorial team gathers to publish an issue of SPROUT, we reflect on the role of poetry to comment on the current state of the eco-urban. When we read through the submissions, we feel that our original vision and mandate for the journal is confirmed by the special...
The world is still reeling from the massive mortality and setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing political invasion and violence between Nation states. Polarized geopolitics has steered us in a dismal direction. Added to this, natural and human-made emergencies are creating further uncertainties. We would have thought that...
The Nature of Cities focuses on creative approaches to greening urban environments, what that means, why it is important, who is involved, and how, including Roundtables on “cities and pollinators“, and regenerative urban agriculture. The focus of this piece is 18 fruit trees installed for 6 months in an art...
In 2020, to halt the building of a logging road in Canada, a group of activists set up blockades to protect woodland in British Columbia. A Pacheedaht elder named Bill Jones was quoted in The Guardian as saying, “We must not stand down”. He went on to call ancient trees...
