Preamble
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The University of Tulsa College of Law occupies an integral and dynamic position within a forward-thinking, private, doctoral-degree-granting University and plays a vital role in its partnerships with the community, the bench and bar, industry, tribal nations, and national and international scholarly communities.
Mission Statement
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The University of Tulsa College of Law prepares students from diverse backgrounds to excel in legal and related professions through an intellectually rigorous program that promotes the core values of excellence in scholarship, dedication to free inquiry, professional ethics and responsibility, and commitment to justice.
Office of the Dean
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Marc L. Roark, J.D., LL.M.
Interim Dean, College of Law
marc-roark@utulsa.edu
Marc Lane Roark currently serves as the interim Chapman Endowed Chair for the College of Law at The University of Tulsa. He most recently served as associate dean of faculty development and director of the Indian Law program. He is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and has worked with tribes and tribal organizations thinking about commercial law problems and their intersection with tribal sovereignty.
Roark holds an affiliated appointment at the University of Pretoria as a research associate professor. He is a member of EVICT, a collaborative network of worldwide scholars researching affordable housing issues. Roark serves on the Advisory Panel for the UNESCO Housing Chair at the Universitat Rovira I Virilli in Tarragona, Spain, and is a founding member of the Resilient Property Research Network with members across Europe, the United States and Africa.
During the 2022-23 academic year, Roark worked with Emory University’s Vulnerability Initiative as a research fellow, the University of Adelaide as a visiting researcher in residence, and National University of Ireland-Galway as a visiting researcher in residence. He previously held appointments at the University of LaVerne, Savannah Law School and Southern University Law Center.
Roark’s research primarily considers how narratives and norms are scaled in property conflicts around housing. Together with Lorna Fox O’Mahony (University of Essex), he developed resilient property theory, a newly minted approach for dealing with challenging resource problems. He is the author of “Squatting and the State: Resilient Property Theory in an Age of Crisis.” His primary areas of work are in the study of housing and homelessness through the lens of property norms.
Roark has published 27 articles in U.S. and international law journals and seven chapters in collections including: “Homelessness at the Cathedral” (2015) 80 Missouri L. Rev. 53; “Human Impact Statements” (2015) 54 Washburn L. J. 649; Under-propertied Persons, 26 Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 1 (2017); and “Scaling Commercial Law in Indian Country,” 8 Texas A&M L. Rev. 89 (2020). In “Scaling Commercial Law in Indian Country,” Roark describes how resources, tribal structures, and uniform legal processes influence adoption of secured finance legislation on Indigenous tribes. His work was the basis of the first economic impact study of secured transactions laws on tribes (See Dippel, Frye, Feir, and Roark, Secured Transactions Laws and Economic Development on American Indian Reservations, 111 AEA Papers and Proceedings 1 (2021). He is currently working on several projects focused on resilience gaps and resilient property theory applied across numerous areas including housing, ruralism, Indian law and commercial law.
