Bernadette Atuahene

Bernadette Atuahene is an American professor of law, property law scholar, and author. She is the inaugural James E. Jones Chair at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and previously was a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and a research professor for the American Bar Foundation.

Atuahene is the author of We Want What's Ours: Learning from South Africa's Land Restitution Program, a 2014 ethnography of the post-apartheid land restitution program, and won the 2020 John Hope Franklin Award from the Law and Society Association for her California Law Review article "Predatory Cities," based on her 2018 ethnography of property tax assessments in Detroit. She has also advocated with community groups in Detroit for government action on property taxes.

Early life and education Atuahene was raised in Los Angeles by Ghanaian parents, and completed her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1997, as well as an M.P.A. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2002.

Career As a Fulbright scholar, Atuahene was a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She was then an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York before becoming faculty at Chicago-Kent College of Law in 2005. She also became an ABF research professor in 2016.

As part of the grassroots Coalition to End Unconstitutional Tax Foreclosures in 2018, Atuahene called for government action to redress what she described as "unconstitutional assessments, which have led to illegally-inflated property taxes that people could not afford to pay, and so they were evicted from their homes in record numbers for property taxes they weren't supposed to be paying in the first place."

In 2020, Atuahene was an organizer and advocate for the Detroit grassroots community organization Coalition for Property Tax Justice, which lobbied for the creation of a property tax compensation fund for overtaxed homeowners. In 2021, she described the creation of the Detroit Tax Relief Fund as "a good first step." In 2022, she continued to advocate with the Coalition for Property Tax Justice for an end to property tax overassessments.

As of 2025 she holds the Duggan Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.

Her book, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America was released January 28, 2025. To develop the book, Atuahene conducted an ethnographic field study of the land restitution program in post-apartheid South Africa, with support and institutional review from the American Bar Foundation and Chicago-Kent College of Law.

The research conducted by Atuahene included interviews with land restitution claimants and government workers who administered the program. National Science Foundation award

Selected works

Atuahene, Bernadette (January 28, 2025). Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America