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Ariel Clark

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Ariel Clark (she/they) is an attorney advising clients in highly regulated and emerging ecosystems. For over 15 years, Ariel has provided business, corporate, and regulatory support to organizations, non-profits, government agencies, tribes, healthcare providers, and practitioners with an emphasis on cannabis, plant medicines, and psychedelics. Ariel takes a common-sense approach to legal advice, and her clients are heart-based, brilliant people who care about building and maintaining successful, impactful, and ethical organizations and offerings. Ariel is actively engaged in the conversation about “psychedelic lawyering” (ethical lawyering grounded in our responsibilities to all our relatives) and helping to shape policies that emphasize open source, ethical business models that honor the Earth, Peoples, and lineages. Ariel is a co-founder of the Psychedelic Bar Association (PBA) and serves on PBA’s Legacy Board. She is co-producing the series Law & Ethics: The Psychedelics Industry and Indigenous Peoples and related resource library (e.g. Rights of Nature, Nagoya Protocol, UNDRIP) in service of her inquiry and advocacy (which is also a prayer) – can the overculture legalize “psychedelics” to help facilitate healing in a good way and do less harm to Indigenous communities and the medicines Themselves? Ariel has written on Rights of Nature as a vehicle to protect sacred plants and traditional cultural knowledge, and she regularly lectures at universities and law schools, including Columbia, Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Berkeley on biopiracy, Nagoya Protocol, and other issues related to ecological justice, drug policy reform, and Indigenous rights. Ariel recently joined the board of Benefit Honoring, an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building a global community rooted in Indigenous traditional lifeways and biocultural preservation. She is a member of Roots To Sky Sanctuary, a BIPOC-stewarded, land-based healing and community project. She is also honored to be in study of Indigenous Peacemaking ways. She has a Bachelors of Arts from University of Michigan in Religious Studies (2000) and a JD from Berkeley Law School (2005). While in law school, Ariel participated with a group of other Native American law students in discussions at the United Nation for what became the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Ariel is an enrolled Tribal citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa & Chippewa Indians and is Of Counsel with Calyx Law.

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Prior Experience

  • California Indian Legal Services, Law Clerk & Staff Attorney

  • Clark Howell LLP, Co-Founder & Partner

 

Awards

  • Rolling Stone one of 18 “Women Shaping The Culture of Tomorrow”

  • Entrepreneur’s “Top 100 Cannabis Leaders”

  • Hyphae’s “100 Grassroots Psychedelic Community Leaders”

  • mg Magazine’s “30 Most Powerful Cannabis Lawyers”

  • Cannabis Business Executive’s “75 Most Important Women in Cannabis”

  • Cannabis Law Report’s “Global Top 200 Cannabis Lawyers”

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Associations

 

  • Psychedelic Bar Association

  • International Cannabis Bar Association

  • LA County Bar Association

  • California Cannabis Industry Association

  • California Native American Cannabis Industry Association

  • California Growers Association 

 

Speaking Engagements

 

  • Practicing Law Institute 

  • MAPS Psychedelic Science 

  • Digital Hollywood 

  • National Business Institute 

  • Trailblazers 

  • Psychedelic Liberty Summit

  • MJBiz 

  • ReMind

  • Orange County IP Bar Association

  • LA County Bar Association Cannabis Seminars

  • Psychedelic Law Summit

  • LA County Environmental Law Conference 

 

Quoted in

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  • Politico, Rolling Stone, CNN, Vox, Associated Press, Yahoo Finance, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Modesto Bee, LA Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Law 360, Daily Journal, Double Blind, Green Market Report, Marijuana Business Daily, Cannabis Business Executive.

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