Sheila R. Foster is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at Georgetown. She holds a joint appointment with the Georgetown Law School and the McCourt Public Policy School. Prior to joining Georgetown, she was a University Professor and the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law at Fordham University where she co-directed the Fordham Urban Law Center and was a founder of the Fordham University Urban Consortium. She served as Associate Dean and then Vice Dean at Fordham Law School from 2008-2014. Prior to joining Fordham, she was a Professor of Law at the Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.
Professor Foster writes in the areas of property, land use, environmental justice, and local government law. Her most recent work explores questions of urban law and governance through the lens of the “commons” exemplified by her article The City as a Commons, Yale Law and Policy Review (2016) and her forthcoming MIT Press Book, Co-Cities.
Professor Foster has been involved on many levels with urban law and policy. She was the chair of the advisory committee of the Global Parliament of Mayors from 2017-2020 and serves as co-chair of the Equity Workgroup on the New York City Mayor's Panel on Climate Change. She also co-directs LabGov, an international applied research project that works directly with local governments to craft, implement and evaluate new policies that enable city residents to steward land and other resources within their communities. At Georgetown, she is the faculty director of the Georgetown Project on State and Local Government Policy and Law (SALPAL) and lead researcher for the City Diplomacy Project for the Georgetown Global Cities Initiative.