A New Frontier: Thomas Mitchell ’87 Launches Initiative to Study and Reform Black Land Loss, Heirs' Rights and Property Law
BC Law – Mitchell, professor of law and Robert F. Drinan Chair at Boston College Law School and a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship winner, answers questions from the law school’s magazine. His work includes establishing BC’s new Initiative on Land, Housing and Property Rights.
Mitchell is a co-author of the 2022 publication “Black Land Loss: 1920–1997,” “a first-of-its-kind quantitative examination of the decline of Black agricultural ownership in America,” writes Vicki Sanders. “The cost to that community during the period? $326 billion. The findings made national news.” Mitchell is also the lead co-editor and a contributing author for the 2022 book Heirs’ Property and the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act: Challenges, Solutions, and Historic Reform.
Among other topics, the Q&A addresses how Mitchell first became interested in the legal issues surrounding land ownership and land loss among Black and brown people in the United States. He outlines what he calls the “four pillars” of the new initiative at BC (one of which includes the upcoming Land Loss, Reparations & Housing Policy Conference) and mentions further areas of research and scholarship that interest him.
(Read more about Mitchell and his work in a Summer 2021 Amherst magazine profile.)