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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.

Closing Statement

Boston College offers a broad and competitive range of benefits depending on your job classification eligibility:

+ Tuition remission for Employees

+ Tuition remission for Spouses and Children who meet eligibility requirements

+ Generous Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance

+ Low-Cost Life Insurance

+ Eligibility for both University-Funded 401k and Employer-Sponsored 403b Retirement Plans

+ Paid Holidays Annually

+ Generous Sick and Vacation Pay

+ Additional benefits can be found on https://www.bc.edu/employeehandbook

Boston College conducts pre-employment background checks as part of the hiring process.

Boston College is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected category, including disability and protected veteran status. Boston College's Notice of Nondiscrimination can be viewed at https://www.bc.edu/nondiscrimination .