Professor Alex Pearl is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. Professor Pearl is a nationally recognized scholar in the field of Federal Indian Law. His academic scholarship focuses on the areas of Federal Indian Law, water rights, cultural property, Constitutional Law, Property, and statutory interpretation. Professor Pearl’s scholarship appears in journals at Yale University, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Fordham University, UCLA and many other leading legal publications. Professor Pearl’s academic work was cited and quoted by Justice Gorsuch in his concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Haaland v. Brackeen. In addition to his scholarly work, Professor Pearl is deeply involved in Indian Country in myriad ways. He presently serves as an Associate Justice on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations Supreme Court. Professor Pearl is also the CEO of the Cobell Scholarship Fund.
Professor Pearl obtained his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley—School of Law. While at Berkeley Law, he was a research assistant for the late esteemed scholar of federal Indian law, Professor Philip Frickey. After graduation, Professor Pearl clerked for the Honorable William J. Holloway Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and then worked as an associate at Kilpatrick Townsend in Washington, D.C. where he exclusively resented Indian tribes and individual Indians including the plaintiff class in the historic Cobell litigation.
In 2026, Professor Pearl joined the faculty at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Previously, Professor Pearl was on the faculty at the University of Oklahoma College of Law from 2020 until 2025. While at OU, he was affiliate faculty in the Department of Native American Studies as well as with the South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center. For the previous six years, he was a member of the faculty at Texas Tech University School of Law, where he was the Director of the Center for Water Law and Policy and affiliate faculty with the Texas Tech Climate Science Center.