Rebecca Sandefur

Sandefur investigates access to civil justice from every angle – from how legal services are delivered and consumed, to how civil legal aid is organized around the nation, to the role of pro bono, to the relative efficacy of lawyers, nonlawyers and digital tools as advisers and representatives, to how ordinary people think about their justice problems and try to resolve them. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018. In addition to her appointment as a professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics, Sandefur is Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Access to Justice Research Initiative. She is also the editor-in-chief for the journal Law and Society Review. In 2013, Sandefur was The Hague Visiting Chair in the Rule of Law. In 2015, she was named Champion of Justice by the National Center for Access to Justice. She was named a MacArthur Fellow for her work on inequality and access to justice: “By bridging legal scholarship and practice, Sandefur is providing the empirical evidence necessary to guide and implement wide-scale reforms to address the civil legal needs of low-income people.”

Photos by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.