Access Group awards American Bar Foundation $320K grant

The American Bar Foundation (ABF) has been awarded a $320,000 grant from Access Group, Inc., a nonprofit organization that works to promote access to legal and graduate education through research, policy advocacy, and direct member and student educational services. The grant comes from Access Group’s Center for Research & Policy Analysis (the “Center”) and will support the ABF’s Emerging and Visiting Scholars Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education.

The Center announced the recipients of over $1.2 million in grants to “promote access, diversity and research” in legal education. “The Access Group Center for Research & Policy Analysis is pleased to award the American Bar Foundation a $320,000 grant to support the Emerging and Visiting Scholars Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education,” Christopher P. Chapman, president and CEO of Access Group, said in an email.
“Advancing scholarly research in legal education, and in higher education more broadly, is a core priority of the Center.”

The amount awarded to the ABF comes from the Center’s directed grant program. It will support two new programs at the ABF: the Visiting Scholar Program in Legal and Higher Education and the Doctoral Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education. The goal of both programs is to advance scholarship examining access, affordability, and value in legal and higher education.

Existing law and social science scholars interested in studying legal and higher education are invited to apply for the visiting scholar program. While in residence at the ABF, visiting scholars will have the opportunity to conduct their research in an empirical and interdisciplinary research environment and benefit from the ABF’s academic and administrative resources.

Emerging scholars interested in empirical and interdisciplinary research on legal and higher education are invited to apply for the doctoral fellowship program. This fellowship is open to Ph.D. candidates whose doctoral research shows promise of a major contribution to social scientific understanding of legal and higher education.

With these two new programs, the ABF aims to assemble and coordinate a professional network of scholars who will produce innovative, objective, empirical, and interdisciplinary research in the field of legal and higher education. Doctoral fellows and visiting scholars will have access to the ABF’s interdisciplinary scholarly community and benefit from mentoring provided by its research faculty.

“We are delighted and grateful to receive this generous grant from Access Group to support our Emerging and Visiting Scholars Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education,” said Ajay K. Mehrotra, director of the ABF. “With this grant, we plan to further enhance the ABF’s long-standing tradition as an incubator for the next generation of innovative and influential scholars.”