Gregory Ablavsky is the Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and of History (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is a legal historian of the early United States and one of the nation’s leading experts on the history of federal Indian law. He has also researched and written extensively on the legal history of federal public lands, the U.S. territories, and federal-state relations. His work has been repeatedly been cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. His book Federal Ground: Governing Property and Violence in the First U.S. Territories (Oxford University Press, 2021), won the Cromwell Book Prize from the American Society of Legal History and the Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association. His articles in top law reviews and history journals have also received multiple additional awards and recognitions, including the inaugural Cromwell Foundation Prize for Legal History Article of the Year in 2023.

Professor Ablavsky is an editor and co-author on Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, the leading treatise in the field. He received the law school’s John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2019 and 2023.

Prior to joining the Stanford Law faculty in 2015, Professor Ablavsky was the Sharswood Fellow in Law and History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also received his J.D./Ph.D. in American Legal History. He clerked for Judge Anthony Scirica of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was also a law clerk for the Native American Rights Fund in Washington, D.C., and a fifth-grade teacher on the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico.