Sheila Foster is a Professor of Law and Public Policy, jointly appointed with Georgetown’s McCourt School. Currently, she is Chair of the advisory committee of the Global Parliament of Mayors; a member of the Aspen Institute’s Urban Innovation Working Group; and an advisory board member of the Marron Institute for Urban Management at NYU. She also sits on the New York City Panel on Climate Change. As co-director with Christian Iaione of the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons (LabGov), she is engaged in the “Co-Cities Project,” an applied research initiative, examining public policies and local projects in over 100 cities around the world.

Prior to joining Georgetown, Foster was University Professor and the Albert A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law at Fordham University. She also 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. Earlier, she was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

Professor Foster writes on environmental law and justice, urban land-use law and policy, state and local government, and—most recently—questions of urban law and governance through the lens of the “commons.” This is the subject of her article “The City as a Commons,” published in the Yale Law and Policy Review (2016). Her book, The Co-City, is forthcoming from MIT Press. srf42@georgetown.edu