Justin Richland (JD UC Berkeley, 1996; PhD UCLA, 2004) is a linguistic anthropologist and sociolegal scholar, as well as an Associate Justice of the Hopi Appellate Court, the highest court of the Hopi nation. Currently he is Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of California, Irvine, Chair of the Department of Anthropology at UCI, and Faculty Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. Before his arrival at UC Irvine in 2018, he was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of Chicago, Research Faculty at the American Bar Foundation and Adjunct Curator of North American Anthropology at the Chicago Field Museum from 2011-2018. From 2005-2011, he was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California Irvine. His sociolegal scholarship concerns contemporary Native American law, governance, and their engagement with the US federal and state governments, including their regulatory and adjudicatory systems, as well as on the intellectual history of 20th century Anglo-American Jurisprudence. His essays have appeared in scholarly journals including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Discourse & Society, Law and Social Inquiry, and Law & Society Review. His most recent work, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Behavioral & Cognitive Sciences Program (NSF award # 2332226), concerns Native Nation and US Regulatory Agency consultation and collaboration around wildland fire research and risk management in semi-arid regions of the United States. In 2016, he was named a J.S. Guggenheim Fellow.

Professor Richland served as the co-general editor of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, from 2010-2014. Before that he was co-book reviews editor of American Anthropologist (2006-2010), the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, and served on its Editorial Board at the same time. In that capacity he inaugurated the “Year In Review” section of American Anthropologist, which publishes original articles reviewing the anthropological literature in each of Anthropology’s four subfields, and which continues to this day. In addition he served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Law and Social Inquiry from 2013-2020, and is currently a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Oxford University Press’s “Anthropology of Language” book series. He has regularly reviewed manuscripts for a number of peer-review journals and university presses, including Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Society Review, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Current Anthropologist, PoLAR, Stanford University Press, University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, and University of Toronto Press, among others.