Meghan Morris is an Associate Professor at Temple Beasley School of Law. Her research examines the role of law in conflict, peacemaking, and paramilitary activity, with a particular focus on property over land. She is trained as an anthropologist, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork, property law, and property theory to rethink property and its role in social life. Professor Morris teaches Property and Natural Resources, and previously taught Environmental Law and Public International Law.
Professor Morris has work published or forthcoming in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Alabama Law Review, Tulane Law Review, and the Revista Colombiana de Antropología (Colombian Journal of Anthropology). Her book manuscript, Making Peace with Property: Specters of Post-Conflict Colombia, examines how property can become understood as both the root of violent conflict and the key to peace. It explores this question through an ethnographic account of how the reordering of property is central to efforts to achieve a post-conflict era in Colombia. Her current book project, This Land is My Land: Property, Paramilitarism, and the American Dream, examines the contemporary and historical relationship between property and paramilitarism in the United States. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Inter-American Foundation.
Professor Morris holds a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy with a focus on international environment and resource policy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.S. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University. Prior to joining Temple Law, she was Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati, where she received the University Research Council Faculty Scholars Research Award and the College of Law’s Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She was previously the ABF/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Law and Inequality at the American Bar Foundation and a senior researcher at the Bogotá-based Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia). She has also worked in human rights and environmental advocacy in the United States and Latin America.