Erin Dougherty Lynch

Native American Rights Fund

Erin Dougherty Lynch is a staff attorney based in the Anchorage office.  At NARF, Erin works on a variety of federal Indian law issues, including child welfare, subsistence hunting and fishing rights, voting rights, tribal jurisdiction and sovereignty, and issues related to the relocation of coastal villages threatened by erosion and other problems associated with climate change.  She is heavily involved in issues related to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) on both the state and national level, and she successfully argued Simmonds v. Parks in the Alaska Supreme Court.  

Erin graduated from Willamette University where she was a double major in Politics and History, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and a Truman Scholar. Prior to law school Erin was a Fulbright Scholar based at the University of Tromsø in Tromsø (Romsa), Norway where she conducted masters-level research on Sámi political mobilization and indigenous self-governance within international and Norwegian legal frameworks.  She received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 2008.