Thomas W. Mitchell
Thomas Wilson Mitchell is an American law professor. He is a professor at Texas A&M University. His work focuses on property law, particularly the legal doctrines that have caused Black Americans to lose millions of acres of land since the early 1900s. Mitchell was a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Education and positions. Mitchell attended Amherst College, where he graduated with a B.A. degree in English in 1987. He then attended the Howard University School of Law, obtaining his J.D. degree in 1993. In 1999 he received an LLM degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he  was William H. Hastie Fellow. In 2000, Mitchell joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he became Professor of Law and Frederick W. and Vi Miller Chair in Law. In 2016, he joined the law faculty at Texas A&M University, with a joint appointment as a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics. Research. Mitchell's research has focused on the legal causes of loss of land by Black Americans. He has shown that between the Civil War and the year 1910 Black Americans came to possess about 15 million acres of land in the south , but by the end of the 20th century that number had shrunk to only about 2 million acres. Mitchell has studied the legal processes by which this loss occurred, particularly that laws that govern inheritance in cases where an owner does not leave a will and there are multiple heirs. These doctrines have, over time, caused large amounts of land to leave the heirs of Black property owners through mechanisms like forced partition sales. This type of legal dispossession of land can be viewed as a vestige of Jim Crow laws. Mitchell has argued that forced sale conditions lower the  expected value of a sale, and minority land owners are more likely to be placed in a force sale situation rather than voluntarily choosing to sell land; consequently, this inheritance law systematically lowers their wealth over time. This is an example of legal empiricism, which Mitchell has argued is an important methodology for understanding the causes of land loss. Mitchell was the principal drafter of a law, called the Partition of Heirs Property Act, which aimed to give the descendants of heirs a better chance of retaining property that they wish to retain. By October 2020, the Partition of Heirs  Property Act had been adopted in 18 states. In 2020, Mitchell was named a MacArthur Fellow.