Nate Ela joins UC College of Law faculty

A socially committed scholar with a longstanding interest in urban agriculture, Ela’s scholarship spans property, local government, land use, and election law. He uses historical and ethnographic methods to understand how and why reformers have used property to address poverty and unemployment by reallocating rights to use idle resources. He has been published in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, Law & Social Inquiry, and Social Science History.

Previously, Ela was a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation. He has taught as an Instructor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and a Fellow at Harvard Law School. Ela’s professional experience includes work with the Chicago Food Policy Council on zoning and land tenure issues raised by urban farming; Amnesty International on human rights scenario planning for the organization’s Secretary General; and Grupo Semillas, (Bogotá, Colombia) on agriculture, human rights, food sovereignty, and trade law research.