Kirsten Carlson

Associate Professor of Law and Adjunct Associate Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University
Kirsten Matoy Carlson is a leading authority on federal Indian law and legislation. Her research focuses on legal advocacy and law reform, with particular attention on the various strategies used by Indian nations and indigenous groups to reform federal law and policy effectively. Carlson integrates traditional legal analysis with social science methodologies for studying legal and political advocacy. Her recent article, Lobbying Against the Odds, was selected for presentation at the Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum at Harvard Law School. Her articles have appeared in the Michigan Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, University of Colorado Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Harvard Journal on Legislation, Law and Society Review, American Indian Law Review and Michigan State Law Review.

For the 2019-20 academic year, she holds a career development chair, which honors outstanding research faculty at Wayne State University. From May 2014 through July 2019, she served as the principle investigator on a National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Program grant. During 2017-18, she was one of two inaugural Levin Center Research Scholars. In 2016-17, she received the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from the Wayne State Academy of Scholars. Prior to joining the Law School in 2011, Carlson received a National Science Foundation dissertation research grant to study the constitutional entrenchment of Aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada and a Fulbright scholarship to research attitudes toward the Waitangi Tribunal and the treaty claims settlement process in New Zealand. She has also served as a visiting research scholar at the University of Ottawa and a visiting associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Carlson teaches federal Indian law, legislation, legal change and civil procedure. She received the Donald H. Gordon Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2014 and was selected by students as the Professor of the Year, First Year, in 2017.

Carlson brings a range of professional and academic experience to her teaching and research. She serves on the State Bar of Michigan Standing Committee on American Indian Law and is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Prior to joining Wayne Law, she advocated nationally and internationally to protect the rights of Indian nations as a staff attorney at the Indian Law Resource Center. She led the center's advocacy efforts to restore criminal jurisdiction to Indian nations to end violence against women in Indian Country. She also clerked for the Hon. Diana E. Murphy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Carlson earned her law degree cum laude and a doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan, a master of arts degree with distinction in Maaori studies from the University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a bachelor’s in international studies from The Johns Hopkins University.