Bernadette Atuahene is a property law scholar focusing on land stolen from people in the African Diaspora. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, she grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA for college. She then earned her JD from Yale and her MPA from Harvard. After completing her graduate studies, she served as a judicial clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa and practiced as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York. She is now a chaired professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Gould School of Law.

Professor Atuahene has worked as a consultant for the World Bank and the South African Land Claims Commission. She also directed and produced an award winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. Her first book, We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program (Oxford University Press, 2014), is based on 150 interviews she conducted with South Africans dispossessed of their land by the colonial and apartheid governments and who received some form of compensation post-apartheid. Over 40 scholars have applied the two socio-legal concepts arising from this work–dignity takings and dignity restoration–to different case studies.

Professor Atuahene won a National Science Foundation award for her current research on racialized property tax administration in Detroit. Since 2009, one in three Detroit homes has completed the property tax foreclosure process: the highest rate of property tax foreclosure in any American city since the Great Depression. Professor Atuahene’s academic articles–published in journals such as California Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and New York University Law Review–show that this shocking statistic is in large part due to illegally inflated property tax assessments. In acknowledgement of her trailblazing scholarship, she has received the Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Award for best article on race in 2020 and the Best Article overall in 2024. Professor Atuahene also engages non academic audiences, publishing two New York Times op-eds and appearing on national TV shows such as Democracy Now! and NBC News to discuss her Detroit work.

Drawing on her experience as a community organizer, Professor Atuahene founded and directs the Institute for Law and Organizing. Its first campaign is the Coalition for Property Tax Justice, which consists of over a dozen grassroots organizations in Detroit that have coalesced to accomplish three goals: stop illegally inflated property tax assessments, stop ongoing property tax foreclosures until authorities can assure accurate assessments, and provide compensation for homeowners who the local government overtaxed or foreclosed upon. 

Under Professor Atuahene’s leadership, this movement has secured several landmark wins including: earning 100+ press hits to expose illegal property tax assessments in Detroit and debunk the myth that personal irresponsibility is the problem rather than structural injustice; securing a moratorium on property tax foreclosures for owner-occupied homes in 2020 through 2024, saving over 13,000 homes from foreclosure; helping over 1000 Detroit homeowners secure about $4.4 million in state assistance for delinquent property tax bills; drafting and passing two pieces of legislation to improve property tax justice in Detroit; securing $6 million in compensation from the City of Detroit; and filing property tax appeals for over 1000 Detroit homeowners.

Her newest book, Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America, is based on the ethnographic and quantitative data that she collected through her involvement in the movement for property tax justice. Just as Evicted uses Milwaukee to discuss America’s eviction crisis, Plundered uses Detroit to reveal another under-reported national phenomenon: predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through racist policies. Plundered shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. By following the lives of two Detroit grandfathers—one Black the other white—and their grandchildren, Professor Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits. 

TOPICS: Law, Housing, Race