Brandon Blankenship believes cities and institutions can create better conditions for people to thrive.

His work is organized around a deceptively simple question: What would it take to create communities in which more people have a genuine opportunity to flourish? He works with public institutions, universities, nonprofits, community partners, and professionals to understand difficult human problems, bring the right people around them, and translate what they learn into practical strategies, programs, partnerships, and systems.

Trained as a lawyer, Brandon spent nearly a decade in legal practice before joining the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The courtroom taught him to work with incomplete information, competing explanations, institutional rules, human conflict, and consequential decisions. Higher education expanded that perspective. As a professor, researcher, and experiential educator, he became increasingly interested not simply in how institutions respond to problems, but in how the conditions surrounding people shape whether they are able to live well.

Today, Brandon's work sits at the intersection of human flourishing, public problem-solving, law, ethics, and institutional design. He is especially interested in problems that resist easy ownership because they cross organizational, disciplinary, or jurisdictional boundaries. His approach can begin with research and diagnosis, stakeholder engagement, legal or ethical analysis, or facilitation. It can continue through program design, partnership development, implementation, and evaluation. The particular tools change with the problem. The objective remains the same: move from complexity toward conditions in which people and communities can thrive.

Brandon puts these ideas into practice by building things. He directs the Praxis Legal Lab, which connects students, lawyers, researchers, and community partners around real legal and public-policy problems. His Socio-Trial work explores how communities can examine persistent injustice through a structured process of evidence, deliberation, and collective action. Through the UAB Community Solutions Collaborative, he is helping develop a model for assembling university capabilities around community-defined problems and translating research, expertise, and student talent into practical civic work.

He is particularly interested in what he calls Thriving Cities: the idea that a city should ultimately be judged not only by its economic growth, infrastructure, programs, or institutional outputs, but by whether the conditions of city life enable people to flourish. That perspective directs attention to relationships, justice, health, purpose, opportunity, belonging, institutions, and the physical and social environments in which people live. It also changes the role of expertise. Communities are not simply places in which experts implement solutions. Residents, institutions, practitioners, researchers, and public leaders each possess knowledge necessary to understand the problem and build a workable response.

Brandon is an Assistant Professor in UAB's J. Frank Barefield, Jr. Department of Criminal Justice and serves as Director of the UAB Pre-Law Program and LSAC Designated Pre-Law Advisor. His teaching emphasizes experiential learning and the translation of knowledge into action. In 2025, he received both the UAB President's Award for Excellence in Teaching and the College of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. His work also extends into research on justice, human flourishing, legal institutions, artificial intelligence, and the ways universities can contribute more effectively to the communities around them.

Before entering academia, Brandon practiced law and devoted a substantial portion of his practice to pro bono representation, including capital cases. Earlier in his career, he also worked in information systems for a Department of Defense prime contractor. Those experiences contribute to an unusually interdisciplinary way of approaching problems: law provides a framework for authority and obligation, technology provides tools for building and testing systems, social science provides methods for understanding human conditions, and ethics keeps attention on the question that matters most: What should we be trying to accomplish for people?

Brandon's interest in flourishing extends beyond institutions and cities. He has spent years thinking and writing about marriage, fatherhood, faith, legacy, education, and the relationships through which people help one another become who they are capable of becoming. He and his wife, Donnalee, live south of Birmingham on a hobby farm, where there is usually something being built, planted, repaired, tested, or reconsidered.

Across all of these settings, the underlying work is remarkably consistent: understand the problem, bring together the people who can affect it, build something worth trying, learn from what happens, and keep moving toward better conditions for human flourishing.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

“I am human; nothing human is alien to me.”
—Terence