Thomas Mitchell
Associate Professor of Law
E-mail: tmitchell@wisc.edu
Telephone: 890-1237
Office: Room 7112, Law School
Education:
J.D., Howard University Law School
LL.M., University of Wisconsin Law School
Teaching Areas:
Land Use
Property Law
Remedies
Rural Community Development
Biography
Thomas W. Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He has done extensive work and research on how land tenure regimes impact poor and minority communities. His articles include Destabilizing the Normalization of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role for Legal Empiricism, 2005 Wis. L. Rev. 557 (2005), From Reconstruction To Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community Through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common, 95 Northwestern University Law Review 505 (2001) and The Land Crisis in Zimbabwe: Getting Beyond the Myopic Focus Upon Black & White, 11 Indiana International & Comparative Law Review 587 (2001).
With his research team that includes two real estate economists and a graduate student expert in geographic information systems technology, he is currently working on a Ford Foundation-funded book project that will address the economic, civic and social impacts of black land loss in the rural South. At Wisconsin, he directs the Community Development Externship program. This program places law students with public interest law firms and community-based organizations located in poor, urban and rural communities in the U.S. and the Caribbean to do legal work that assists these communities with asset-based community development initiatives. Recent externs have worked on projects that have addressed discriminatory zoning laws, affordable housing issues, prisoner reentry initiatives, and environmental justice. Externs have recently been placed at sites that include California Rural Legal Services in the Central Valley of California; Bethel New Life in the West Garfield Park neighborhood in Chicago; and the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques in Puerto Rico.
Professor Mitchell serves on the American Bar Association's Property Preservation Task Force and also serves as vice-president of the board of directors of Farmers' Legal Action Group, the leading public interest law firm in the United States that represents the interests of family farmers. Prior to entering academia, Professor Mitchell obtained an LL.M. upon completion of the William H. Hastie Fellowship program at the University of Wisconsin Law School; worked as a litigation associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C.; and served as a law clerk for Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District Court of the D.C. Circuit.
