"Policy Fellow, ILH&PR"

Policy Fellow, ILH&PR

Company:
Boston College

Job Location:
Chestnut Hill, 02467

Category:
Law and Legal Studies

Type:
Full-Time

Boston College Introduction

Founded in 1863, Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university located six miles from downtown Boston with an enrollment of 9,654 full-time undergraduates and 5,072 graduate and professional students. Ranked 37 among national universities, Boston College has 923 full-time and 1,336 FTE faculty, 2,822 non-faculty employees, an operating budget of $1.4 billion, and an endowment in excess of $3.9 billion.

Job Description

The mission of the Initiative on Land,
Housing & Property Rights (the Initiative) is to address real property
issues that impact poor and disadvantaged communities. Many of the activities
the Initiative undertakes assist disadvantaged communities that have been
harmed as a result of lacking adequate land, housing, and other property
rights. The Initiative's core activities include training law students and
other students to develop legal and other technical expertise that can be used
by these students when they are in school and after they graduate to help
disadvantaged people and communities address their land and housing issues; catalyzing both theoretical and applied, policy-relevant research on various
land and housing issues that have been understudied and undertheorized; proactively
working to develop impactful legal reform and policy solutions to address
property problems disadvantaged communities experience; and sponsoring both
continuing legal education programs for lawyers and community legal education
and other outreach programs for disadvantaged communities. The Initiative hopes
to collaborate with other stakeholders in a true spirit of partnership to more
effectively address land and housing issues that disadvantaged communities
experience, specifically communities that are disproportionately though not
exclusively communities of color.

The
Initiative seeks a full-time Post-Graduate Policy Fellow to conduct policy
research and analysis for the Legislative and Policy Laboratory under the
direction of the Policy Director. The Initiative's Legislative and Policy Lab
works to advance concrete policy proposals and law reform solutions that
address land, housing, and community development challenges, in particular
those that disproportionately impact disadvantaged communities. The Initiative
partners with local, state, regional, and national stakeholders to develop
impactful legal reform proposals; supports coalitional advocacy; provides legal
and policy analysis; and designs and disseminates policy proposals that work to
strengthen property rights, intergenerational asset building, and housing and
land security.

The
Post-Graduate Policy Fellow will conduct factual and legal - primarily
legislative and regulatory - research. The fellow also will draft memoranda and
other documents assessing potential policy and law reform solutions in the
areas of affordable housing, land loss and homeownership among disadvantaged
communities, community development, environmental justice, and land use.

A
model of the type of legal reform and policy proposals the Initiative would
like to help develop is the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act (UPHPA), a
groundbreaking model state property statute, which was principally drafted by
Professor Thomas W. Mitchell, the Initiative's founder and Director and a
MacArthur Fellow. Thus far, the UPHPA has been enacted into law in 26
states/jurisdictions that are located in every region of the country, and it
has helped thousands of disadvantaged families across the country maintain ownership
of their family-owned properties and their generational wealth. The Lab also
works to advance other policy solutions, complementary to the UPHPA, to remedy
economic vulnerability and property loss among heirs' property owners. In
addition to its advocacy on heirs' property issues, the Lab engages in a
growing scope of work on other reforms to advance affordable and fair housing
for homeowners and renters, prevent land loss among disadvantaged communities,
and support intergenerational asset building.

The
Initiative is committed to playing leading and supporting roles in developing
additional bold yet pragmatic legal reform and policy proposals to address a
range of land and housing issues disadvantaged communities face.

Annual Salary: $60,000

Requirements

Requirements:

• A law degree (J.D.), master's degree, or another relevant graduate or advanced professional degree required before the position's start date. Applicants may be in their final program year.
• Experience with information collection, analysis, and dissemination, including written and oral presentation of legal reform and policy matters to diverse audiences.
• Experience working with or on behalf of
  disadvantaged communities or individuals or relevant lived experience.

Applicants should have excellent writing and time management skills, motivation to work on behalf of disadvantaged communities, and an interest in learning in detail about our issues and helping to generate concrete policy recommendations.
This is a hybrid position that will require time in the office.