American Bar Foundation

Program: Directed Grants Program
Grantee: American Bar Foundation 
Grant Amount: $577,500
Grant Title: Emerging Scholars Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education

Summary of Grant Outcomes

This grant supports the Emerging Scholars Fellowship Program in Legal and Higher Education, an ongoing partnership between the American Bar Foundation (ABF) and AccessLex Institute. The program aims to diversify the legal profession and train the next generation of empirical and interdisciplinary socio-legal scholars. Fellows have access to an interdisciplinary team of expert faculty mentors and critical financial resources to bridge the gap between them and their peers from historically overrepresented communities. Additionally, they attend a weekly workshop where they receive professional training, peer feedback, and job-market practice.

During the grant period, the ABF selected and mentored three doctoral fellows and two postdoctoral fellows whose research focuses on legal and higher education. All but one of the fellows in this three-year funding cycle were either scholars of color or the first in their family to receive an advanced degree. The program successfully launched several promising young scholars: 

Doctoral

• Christopher Mathis (2020-2021) is currently an assistant professor of law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. His scholarship explores critical race theory, access and equity within higher education, and the philosophical assumptions within legal education. His most recent work has appeared in the Washington and Lee Law Review, the University of Colorado Law Review, Journal of College Student Development, and Education Sciences, among other outlets
• Alex Reiss-Sorokin (2021-2023) completed her dissertation and received her Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society (STS) from MIT in 2024. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University where she is working on adapting her dissertation “Trust in Search: Credibility and Doubt in Legal Research Technologies” into her first book during her time at the Institute for Advanced Study.
• Portia Xiong (2023-2025) is in her second year of the program where she is currently co-chairing their weekly seminar series, giving her invaluable connections to other scholars and organizations. She is currently a J.D./Ph.D. in Anthropology candidate at Northwestern University, where her research interests include the anthropology of law, gender, race, class, and higher education.

Postdoctoral

• Charquia (Wright) Fegins (2020-2022) is currently an assistant professor of law at Florida State University College of Law. Her research focuses on the intersection of civil rights and federal court scholarship. She has published various law reviews, including the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, the Ohio State Law Journal, and the UCLA Law Review.
• Sonya Rao (2021-2023) is a linguistic and legal anthropologist who examines working conditions in multilingual legal spaces. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UCLA in 2021. She is currently on the job market, after concluding an additional one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Law and Inequality at the ABF.