Hillary M. Hoffmann

Hillary Hoffmann is a professor of law at Vermont Law School. Her areas of expertise include federal Indian law, natural resources law, and public lands law. Professor Hoffmann’s recent scholarship analyzes the systems governing natural resource uses on federal and tribal lands and explores the conflicts that arise from Constitutional and other systemic challenges facing indigenous nations 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 forthcoming book examines the federal and state legal structures inhibiting the protection of indigenous cultural values and resources, such as sacred sites, intellectual property, culturally and historically significant items, and ancestral repatriation, and explores the various legal mechanisms that tribes and other indigenous communities are using, challenging and changing to better protect their cultures. 

Prior to joining the faculty at Vermont Law School, Professor Hoffmann practiced in the litigation group at Fabian & Clendenin, P.C. in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her practice areas included general commercial litigation, administrative appeals, and natural resources law. 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.