Marc Lane Roark
Role: Louisiana Outside Counsel of Health and Ethics Endowed Professor of Law, Southern University Law Center; Senior Fellow, Native American Law and Policy Institute
Contact: mroark@sulc.edu
Research Interests:
Property Conflicts
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Housing
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Homelessness
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Resilience Gaps
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Resilient Property Theory
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First Nations
Prof. Marc Lane Roark (he/ him/ his) is the Louisiana Outside Counsel of Health and Ethics Endowed Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. He is also a Senior Fellow with the Native American Law and Policy Institute, a think-tank dedicated to policies relating to Native American tribes in the U.S. and first nations in Canada. Professor Roark also holds an affiliated appointment at the University of Pretoria as a Research Associate Professor. He is also a member of the EVICT research network, a collaborative group of worldwide scholars researching and collaborating on affordable housing issues. Professor 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 U.K., the U.S. and Africa. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Professor Roark will be working 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.
Professor 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 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. Professor Roark has published 23 articles in U.S. law journals, 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 Indian tribes. His work was the basis of the first economic impact study of secured transactions laws on Indian 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 applying vulnerability theory in the context of resilience gaps and resilient property theory across numerous areas including housing, ruralism, Indian law, and commercial law.