Angela R. Riley

Angela R. Riley (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) is the Carole Goldberg Endowed Professor of Native American Law and American Indian Studies at UCLA. She is a Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs and directs UCLA School of Law’s Native Nations Law and Policy Center as well as the J.D./M.A. joint degree program in Law and American Indian Studies. She has chaired the UCLA campus Repatriation Committee since 2010.

Professor Riley's research focuses on Indigenous peoples’ rights, with a particular emphasis on cultural property and Native governance. Her work has been published in the nation’s leading legal journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and numerous others. She received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma and her law degree from Harvard.

She was raised on a working farm at Saddle Mountain, Oklahoma, located within the original borders of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache Indian reservation. In 2003 Professor Riley became the first woman and youngest Justice of the Supreme Court of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She has served as Chief Justice since 2010. She previously served as Co-Chair for the United Nations - Indigenous Peoples’ Partnership Policy Board, with a dedicated mission to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In addition to her own tribe’s Supreme Court, she currently sits as an Appellate Justice at the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians Court of Appeals and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians Court of Appeals.

Professor Riley is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Law Institute. She has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Melbourne Law School.