Land Clinic offers a legal practice that seeks to address place-based rupture and provide pathways towards repair.
At Land Clinic, we work to adapt legal systems, specifically property, contracts, and estate planning, to connect us all to the histories and ecologies of place. We recognize the cultural chasm of loss facilitated by the modern legal system, and ground our offerings in long-held wisdom that land is an extension of self.
The why behind this work
The commodification of land underpins our property law system. The legal system has been used to reinforce this mentality through policy and the creation of jurisprudence hyper-focused on individual status. Access to land and water is further restricted by the limited amount of publicly held lands available. All these factors have dramatically affected people's ability to sustain intergenerational bonds to land and the more-than-human beings that inhabit those places.
Reparative Mapmaking and Land-Based Transactions
The legal histories of land help us understand how we arrived at our present. We work with lineal descendants of a particular place to map ancestral and culturally significant lands providing the relevant legal context by examining deeds, surveys, legislation and other conveyance instruments to help tell this story. It is up to our clients on how they choose to share their stories; however, a consistent theme of this work is to move towards reparative acts like environmental stewarding and land returns.
Nourishing Food and Ecological Systems
We support those restoring our relationship to seed and food. The clinic recognizes the importance of seed rematriation, prioritizing culturally-relevant foods and practices, incorporating regenerative and agroecological approaches as well as other place-based wisdoms. We believe these practices connect all of us to a deeper knowing that all humans have the capacity for but are often lost to conventional agriculture and conservation practices.
Legal Design and Culture Creation
We practice legal design to curate how law is seen, felt, and understood somatically through visual tools and storytelling. Legal design lives at the intersection of law and visual communication, aimed at enhancing the accessibility of legal systems. We employ this concept in our client deliverables as well as in our educational materials.
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