Sheldon Bernard Lyke
Associate Professor
Sheldon Bernard Lyke is an Associate Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, with faculty affiliations in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Racial Justice. He holds a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago. He is a cum laude graduate of Princeton University.
Professor Lyke's scholarship sits at the intersection of property law, critical race theory, and commons theory. His recent work develops a sustained critique of affirmative action jurisprudence, arguing for equality-driven rationales that move beyond the diversity framework. His article Toward a Perpetual Practice of Affirmative Action was published in the Northwestern University Law Review (2025), and his work has also appeared in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Tulane Law Review, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and Cambridge University Press.
He is the founder of the Nur Lab for the Study of the Civic Commons, a research initiative examining how public resources — particularly parks and shared green spaces — are created, maintained, and privatized. The Lab's inaugural project is the Park Roots Inventory Audit, a systematic assessment of Chicago park infrastructure conducted in partnership with Friends of the Parks, for which he serves as Principal Investigator.
Professor Lyke is the President-Elect of the Association of Law, Property, and Society (ALPS) and was named Outstanding 1L Professor of the Year at Loyola (2025–26). A native of Chicago's South Side, he is also a conceptual performance artist under the name B.R.K.F.S.T., with music available on all major streaming platforms.
Education
AB, cum laude, Princeton University
JD, Northwestern University School of Law
PhD, sociology, University of Chicago
Courses Taught
Critical Race Theory
Natural Resources Law
Property
Trusts & Estates
Publications/Research Listings
Professor Sheldon Lyke's SSRN webpage
- Toward a Perpetual Practice of Affirmative Action, 120 Northwestern University School of Law Review 75 (2025)
- Gay Quotas, 54 Southwestern Law Review 233 (2025) (invited symposium)
- Defense Against the Dark Arts: The Diversity Rationale and the Failed Affirmative Defense of Affirmative Action, 80 Washington and Lee Law Review 1873
- Can Affirmative Action Offer a Lesson in Fighting Enclosure? In The Cambridge Handbook of Commons Research Innovations (ed. Shelia Foster and Chrystie Swiney)(Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- Making Strange Laws, 35 University of Pennsylvania Journal of International law 675 (2014)
- Is Resistance to Foreign Law Rooted in Racism?, 109 Northwestern University Law Review Online 41 (2014)
- Diversity as Commons, 88 Tulane Law Review 317 (2014)
- Catch Twenty-Wu? Fisher v. University of Texas and the Obfuscation of Critical Mass, 107 Northwestern University Law Review Colloquy 209 (2013).