Trevor G. Reed

Expertise:

Indigenous creativity and innovation, protection of traditional knowledges and cultural heritage, Indigenous music & sound, copyright law, Tribal and federal Indian law, Indigenous research methodologies

Background:

Professor Trevor G. Reed is a legal scholar and social scientist who studies the impacts of intellectual property law on people and communities. He combines legal and anthropological approaches to understand how regulation of creativity and innovation affects the human experience, including community wellbeing, economic stability, political systems, and local culture.

Professor Reed’s current research looks at how illicit appropriations of Indigenous peoples’ creativity and cultural data impacts their sovereignty today, and what opportunities currently exist to address these impacts. Recent articles in the California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and BYU Law Review examined how well American intellectual property laws protect Indigenous creative works from misappropriation and explored what remedies might be available through existing IP frameworks and restorative justice mechanisms when these legal protections fail.  The findings from these studies have been taken up by the Firekeepers initiative, led by ASU’s Labriola National American Indian Data Center with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which works to restore governance over important intellectual resources back to Tribal Nations in the Southwestern United States.

Professor Reed also regularly partners with Tribal Nations in the development of research-based legal frameworks and educational tools grounded in local culture to better promote and protect their creativity and innovation. In recognition of this work, Professor Reed was named an ASU Charter Professor, and his efforts have been reported in journals like the Journal of the Copyright Society, Journal for the Society of American Music, and various news outlets.

Professor Reed strongly believes in building interdisciplinary spaces for Indigenous and Indigenous-allied thinkers to tackle issues of global importance. He led Arizona State University’s Indigenous Innovation Initiative from 2023-2025 and has regularly collaborated with agencies and organizations like the U.S. Copyright Office, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, ChangeLabs, the Association of Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Local Contexts to promote and protect Indigenous creativity and innovation. Since 2017, Professor Reed and Dr. Jessica Bissett-Perea (University of Washington) have spearheaded an interdisciplinary collaborative of Indigenous scholars researching the ways Indigenous sovereignty is expressed, performed, understood, and experienced. A forthcoming volume, Sovereign Aesthetics (Duke Unviersity Press), includes the original contributions of 13 of these Indigenous scholars.

Professor Reed currently serves as an associate justice on the high court of the Hopi Tribe and sits on the executive board of the Section on Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples of the Association for American Law Schools.

Prior Courses:

Property; Copyright Law; Federal Indian Law I & II; Cultural Resources Law; Art, Culture & the Law; Intellectual Property and Social Change; Music and the Indigenous Experience in North America

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