Engaged Scholarship: How Wake Forest Law Is on the Forefront of Scholarship That Has a Real-World Impact

The Projects

“Understanding and Protecting Heirs’ Property in Boston-Thurmond”

Professor Scott Schang, Director of the Wake Forest Law Environmental Law & Policy Clinic and Co-Lead on the Heirs’ Property Project

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Professor Scott Schang submitted a proposal to better understand the roots of heirs’ property in the Boston-Thurmond neighborhood of Winston-Salem, NC. Heirs’ property—land held collectively by family members, often without clear title—creates significant risks such as tax foreclosure, legal disputes, and vulnerability to exploitation. However, it can also reflect deep cultural values tied to family legacy, community, and generational wealth. 

As such, the goal of the project was to bring legal solutions tailored to the expressed needs and desires of the community to help owners protect their real property and family legacies. Using a community-centered, interdisciplinary approach and combining legal analysis, data mapping, and ethnographic research, the components of the project included:

1. Identifying where heirs’ property exists locally using tax and deed records.
2. Exploring why families create and maintain such ownership structures through interviews.
3. Examining ways to reduce unintended creation of heirs’ property while respecting community preferences.
4. Developing legal and policy strategies to help families preserve their land.

With funding support from the ES Grant program, Professor Schang held community meetings, recruited interviewees, conducted interviews, and conducted a literature review. “Although interviewees had some diversity of opinion, by far most interviewees saw their homes and properties as places for blood family to stay and find refuge, perhaps what bell hooks calls a homeplace,” says Professor Schang. “Very few saw the home primarily as a financial asset or source of wealth or income.”

His work continues, as he documents his findings, which include suggestions of legal interventions that can better protect interviewees’ desires for their properties. The hope is that this will result in more secure home ownership. Professor Schang believes that engaged scholarship is about, “Listening and learning from community partners and applying research to help devise better solutions that meet partners’ stated needs.”

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The Ripple Effects of Dobbs on Biomedical Research

Professor Christine Coughlin (JD ’90)

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Professor Chris Coughlin sought funds to explore the intersection of biomedical research, regenerative medicine, and post-Dobbs legal developments, arguing that emerging state-level “personhood” laws may produce unintended and far-reaching consequences for biomedical advancements. Her proposal centered on two intertwined areas of inquiry: brain organoid research and embryological research, both of which sit at the intersection between scientific innovation and evolving legal definitions of human life.

The landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, has increased tension and risk with research. This decision opened the door wider to broader definitions of personhood that could extend well beyond the abortion context. In addition to blurring the question of when biological material should be afforded personhood status, it also may restrict the use of biologic materials that, in some cases, are used for organoid and embryological research. These developments have increased the risk to researchers, undermining potential progress in biomedical research. 

Professor Coughlin’s work has resulted in numerous publications, including a media article featured in Yahoo! Science; dozens of presentations at national and international conferences across disciplines like health justice, mental health, neuroscience, AI, and more; and a forthcoming book on a different topic that arose from connections she made through her work on personhood. “I have enjoyed this line of work particularly because of the interdisciplinary collaborations involved with public-facing research,” says Professor Coughlin. “I have collaborated with physicians, philosophers, ethicists, scientists, and individuals involved with public policy… These partnerships have enriched my scholarship and helped ensure that it speaks to audiences beyond the legal academy.”

Professor Coughlin is continuing to monitor developments in this area, research and write, and develop interdisciplinary collaborations across Wake Forest University and the country. She says, “By centering my publications, presentations, and service around the experiences of researchers, clinicians, and patients, I am hoping that my work helps to illuminate the possible chilling effect that the Dobbs decision may have on biomedical researchers, which, in turn, could affect potential biomedical advancements that could help individuals with neurodegenerative and other brain-related diseases, pregnant women and newborns, and others.”

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Access to Environmental Justice

Professor Alyse Bertenthal

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The goal of Professor Bertenthal’s proposed fieldwork project was to investigate environmental courts and tribunals (ECTs) in the United States, focusing on their potential to improve access to justice—particularly for marginalized communities facing environmental harm. Little is known about how these specialized courts function in practice or whether they meaningfully advance environmental justice. 

The project sits at the intersection of environmental justice (EJ) and access to justice (A2J), two fields that probe related questions about enhancing civil justice for historically marginalized populations. Professor Bertenthal used the ES Grant to support ethnographic fieldwork that would assist in 1) generating a comprehensive analysis of the various organizational and design features of US ECTs; 2) cataloging the A2J issues that manifest in ECTS; and 3) assessing how various institutional design features facilitate or impede access to environmental justice. With the grant, Professor Bertenthal observed dozens of hearings in ECTs; conducted approximately 12 interviews with litigants, attorneys, court personnel, and other stakeholders; and submitted an article to a peer-reviewed journal. 

Her findings were particularly impactful for poverty-stricken communities, which face some of the worst environmental devastation in the nation—from the building of low-income housing developments on former toxic waste dumps to the systematic destruction of sacred lands to develop oil and gas pipelines. “We know that members of these communities are too frequently excluded from the administrative process (Skinner-Thompson 2022) and that common litigation strategies based on anti-discrimination statutes have had limited success and, in any case, require deep pockets and extraordinary patience,” says Professor Bertenthal (Todd 2020). “ECTs offer several advantages over both agencies and traditional courts… In theory at least, ECTs promise to be well-integrated, productive, interdisciplinary spaces where more people can use the law to address the multiple, nuanced, historically laden threads that generate environmental injustice in their lives and communities.”

Moreover, ECTs may prove to offer more broadly applicable innovations for reimagining the delivery of civil justice. “Yet civil justice policy should extend beyond just making courts work better,” she says. “Improving civil justice also means making sure communities have access to the information and expertise that will enable them to make informed decisions and to take action to protect their rights… By collecting, sharing, and assessing information about ECTs, this project takes a step in that knowledge-democratizing effort through creation of a community-engaged digital research project.”  

Professor Bertenthal is continuing to analyze data and draft public-facing materials, as well as academic articles—none of which would have been possible without an ES Grant. For her, engaged scholarship “means generating conversations outside the academic community, and expanding access to knowledge for those who have the greatest stake in law and policy reform. Just as importantly, this project takes aim at the underlying issues of inequity and exclusion that permeate even progressive scholarship to exclude marginalized research subjects from the very research seeking to describe and intervene in their lives.”