American Bar Foundation
Shaping policy through critical legal research.
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is among the world’s leading research institutes for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law, legal processes, and legal institutions. The ABF, an independent, nonprofit organization, has for more than 65 years advanced the understanding and improvement of law through groundbreaking research projects of unmatched scale and quality on the most pressing issues facing the legal system in the United States and the world.
ABF research is conducted by its distinguished resident faculty and more than 50 affiliated scholars from across the U.S. and the world.
The annual grants ABF receives from ABE are vital to enable ABF to continue its critically acclaimed work, which includes:
- Study of access to justice and digital legal technologies
- Examination of trends in the diversity in the legal profession and other institutions of justice
- Assessment of the effects of parental incarceration
on children - Innovative scholarship on Latinos in the United States
"The ABE’s grant to the ABF not only allows us to conduct our innovative and influential research, it is also the catalyst for nearly all the work of the ABF."