Professor Hoffmann's areas of expertise include environmental law, federal Indian law, and natural resources law. Her recent scholarship analyzes the systems governing natural resource uses on federal and tribal lands and explores the conflicts that arise from Constitutional and other legal challenges facing indigenous nations and indigenous peoples in the United States. She has also lectured and published extensively on the topics of energy development, mining, livestock grazing, and other extractive uses of public lands and tribal lands. Her recent book—A Third Way: Decolonizing the Laws of Indigenous Cultural Protection (Cambridge U. Press 2020)—examines the federal and state legal structures inhibiting the protection of indigenous cultural values and resources, including modern environmental laws, and explores the various legal mechanisms that tribes and other indigenous communities are using, challenging and changing to better protect their lands, cultures, and citizens.
Professor Hoffmann was in private practice at a large law firm in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work included general commercial litigation, administrative appeals, and state and federal natural resource cases. She represented a wide variety of clients in state and federal court, and before the Department of Interior’s Office of Hearings and Appeals. Professor Hoffmann received her BA in Spanish literature with high honors from Middlebury College and her JD from the S. J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. In law school, she was a William H. Leary Scholar, the Richard L. Dewsnup Fellow in Natural Resource Law, and a member of the Utah Law Review. Professor Hoffmann is licensed in Utah and Vermont and is admitted to the Vermont Supreme Court, the Utah Supreme Court, the federal district courts for the districts of Utah and Vermont, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is a member of the Vermont Commission on Native American Affairs and the American Law Institute.
