The Legal Atlas is a public-private partnership between the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center of The University of Montana and The Legal Atlas, LLC to establish a global center for international legal research and development in the fields of natural resources, environment, and agriculture.

Around the world, inadequate law and implementation are prime drivers in conflict when they fail to provide fair and secure access to land and natural resources, or prevent environmental degradation. Afghanistan is an obvious example of where the absence of needed land tenure laws is exacerbating conflict in a region already ravaged by war. Many other countries offer examples where inadequate natural resource, environment, and agricultural legislation are major factors contributing to poverty and poor health. Without laws and implementation systems to protect water sources or keep chemical wastes from entering food supplies, not just poor or uneducated people suffer. Problems spawned by inadequate or non-existent legal structures ignore national boundaries, whether political, economic, or cultural.

The Legal Atlas endeavors to help create solutions for these global problems. Its main goal is to become a knowledge management platform for use by a growing international community of experts and institutions dedicated to improving natural resource, environment, and agricultural legal tools for the public and private sector. The Legal Atlas will produce tools including legal analyses, comparative assessments, best practice guidelines, e-learning programs, practice papers, and geo-referenced spatial data that provide a comprehensive understanding of a country's legal agenda in these fields.