Melissa L. Tatum

Melissa Tatum is Research Professor of Law, as well as Director of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law. She has worked extensively with tribal courts, with much of her work involving the development of a method for indexing, digesting, and publishing tribal court opinions. She served as the general editor for the Mvskoke Law Reporter, an eight-volume set containing the court opinions of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from 1832 to present, and as the editor of three different volumes of the Navajo Law Reporter. From 1999 to 2006, she sat as a judge on the Southwest Intertribal Court of Appeals.

Professor Tatum specializes in tribal jurisdiction and tribal courts, as well as in issues relating to cultural property and sacred places. She was a contributing author to Felix Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law, and has written extensively about both civil and criminal procedural issues, as well as about the relationship between tribal, state, and federal courts. She has served on task forces in Michigan and New Mexico charged with developing procedures to facilitate cross-jurisdictional enforcement of protection orders, and has taught seminars on domestic violence and protection orders throughout the United States for judges, attorneys, law enforcement, and victim advocates, including at the National Tribal Judicial Center. Professor Tatum joined the University of Arizona faculty in January 2009, after serving as a faculty member at the University of Tulsa for more than thirteen years. [Source: The University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law]