Indian Property Rights and Right of Way Projects!

Infrastructure Junkies! Exploring Eminent Domain, Right of Way, and Infrastructure Development (formerly The Pendulum Land Podcast)

Indian property rights scholar Bethany Berger, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, joins Infrastructure Junkies! to explain the intersection between Indian rights and right of way projects and infrastructure development in the United States. She discusses the derivation of Indian property interests, how Indian reservations were established, the laws that govern Indian property rights, the source of those laws, and the effects of burial grounds and Indian artifacts on a project.

For more information on this topic, the regulation on rights of way over trust and restricted lands on reservations can be found at 25 CFR 169 (there are some older statutes that apply to reservations generally), and the best resource to find out more about Indian property rights is Cohen’s Handbook on Federal Indian Law, which is available on Lexis (but not Westlaw). Ch.15, section 15.09[4] is all about rights of way, and Ch.20 section 20.02[3] is all about the National Historic Preservation Act.

Special thanks to our sponsor, Blackbird Right of Way, a full service, DBE certified right of way company, for making this episode possible.