American Bar Foundation

The American Bar Foundation (ABF), founded in 1952, has become one of the major centers for inter-disciplinary research in the field of law and society. It began as a combination of grants to outside researchers and in-house researchers, exclusively law-trained, whom the board of directors charged with doing research to help the various initiatives of the American Bar Association (ABA). The ABF gradually evolved to its status in the 1970s and 1980s. As of 2005, the ABF had a budget of roughly $6 million and a research staff that included twenty-two research fellows trained as follows: eight in law (four with law training only), two in anthropology, three in economics, three in history, six in sociology, two in political science, and two in psychology. The ...