Professor Marc L. Roark is a smart guy – smart enough to admit there’s always more to learn.
Roark, who currently serves as the interim Dean and Chapman Endowed Chair for the College of Law at The University of Tulsa, is an internationally known expert in housing and property law and homelessness. He began his career as an academic at UTulsa with a short teaching stint in 2007 and returned in 2023 for the opportunity to shape the practice of law on a full-time basis.
“I have always seen a legal education as the perfect blend of humanities, arts and sciences, methods, and problem solving,” he said. “Law and the legal academy are uniquely situated to take on the various challenges that modern society faces. Attorneys blend the ability to contextualize problems against a range of backdrops while also serving their client’s needs.
“I often talk to my students about Epistemic humility – which is one way to say having the self-awareness to know that you don’t know everything. We instill students with the capacity to listen with empathy, to respond with depth and understanding, and to communicate to their audience a pathway to frame the legal issues in ways that serve their clients.”
Roark most recently served as UTulsa Law’s 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 received his bachelor’s degree in history from Louisiana State University, his J.D. degree from Loyola University New Orleans School of Law, and his LL.M. degree from Duke University School of Law.
Roark grew up in Louisiana and has lived in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and other major cities. He’s traveled to 18 countries on six continents and regularly lectures in England, Ireland, and Spain on housing, squatting, and homelessness issues. “Over the past few years, working on housing issues in Spain, Ireland, Australia, and South Africa, I have been privileged to develop a network of worldwide scholars working on real problems at the urban and state level of housing policy,” he said.
Roark and his wife, Carla Rechenthin Roark, an engineer with Williams Energy, have two children and have hosted six exchange students from Italy, Brazil, and France.