Rebecca L. Sandefur

Arizona State University | ASU

The access-to-justice crisis is bigger than law and lawyers. It is a crisis of exclusion and inequality. Today, access to justice is restricted: only some people, and only some kinds of justice problems, receive lawful resolution. Access is also systematically unequal: some groups-wealthy people and white people, for example-get more access than ot...

In this study, we explore how men faculty understand the role of gender in shaping faculty experiences in academic science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and how they position themselves in relation to inequalities disfavouring women. Our data reveal diversity among men in their understandings regarding challenges facing women in S...

Since the mid-1990s, at least 28 large-scale national surveys of the public's experience of justiciable problems have been conducted in at least 15 separate jurisdictions, reflecting widespread legal aid reform activity. While the majority of these surveys take their structure from Genn's Paths to Justice survey (1999), they vary significantly in l...

Lawyers keep the gates of public justice institutions, particularly through their roles in formal procedures like hearings and trials. Yet, it is not clear what lawyers do in such quintessentially legal settings: conclusions from past research are bedeviled by a lack of clear theory and inconsistencies in research design. Conceptualizing litigation...

This book reviews the methods and findings of legal needs studies in 14 countries.

This article describes a proposed randomized control trial (RCT) involving individuals in financial distress, specifically, individuals sued on a credit card debt collection case by a debt buyer or creditor. The aim of the RCT is to evaluate the effectiveness of two interventions often proposed to help individuals in financial distress improve thei...

The provision of pro bono services by private lawyers has become a crucial source of legal assistance to poor clients within the U.S. civil justice system. As other features of the system — particularly federally sponsored legal services — have been in decline over the past quarter century, powerful actors in the profession have mobilized to increa...

ACCESS ACROSS AMERICA is the first-ever state-by-state portrait of the services available to assist the U.S. public in accessing civil justice. The report documents, for the nation as a whole and individually for the 50 states and the District of Columbia: Who is eligible for free civil legal information, advice or representation (civil legal assis...

Both professional work and the sociological study of professional work experienced a “golden age” in the mid-20th century. When dramatic changes began to shake the professions in the 1970s and 1980s, however, old approaches no longer fit, and the research area became quiescent. Yet interest in professional work simply “went underground,” surfacing...

Classical access to justice research was often highly compelling, but it was also often myopic. One legacy of early work is scholars' and practitioners' tendency to conceptualize access as a social problem that is faced by lower status groups, such as poor people. Another legacy is a penchant for reducing questions of justice to matters of law. The...

Access to civil justice is a perspective on the experiences that people have with civil justice events, organizations, or institutions. It focuses on who is able or willing to use civil law and law-like processes and institutions (who has access) and with what results (who receives what kinds of justice). This article reviews what we know about acc...

In this article, I provide three lenses on empirical evidence about the American public’s experience with civil justice problems: the depth of public experience, the scope of public experience, and the impact of counsel on public experience. The analysis of empirical evidence reveals a fundamental problem with traditional U.S. thinking and policy c...

Lawyers, law professors and experts on professional education perennially proclaim that law schools teach students to think like lawyers but not to act like them. Legal education’s emphasis in the cognitive dimension comes at the expense of critical professional development in the skills (expertise) and civic (identity) dimensions. Clinical legal e...

In the United States, more than 70 people currently serve life without possibility of parole sentences for crimes they committed before age 15.1 Professor Kupchik’s comparative study of court personnel who prosecute, defend and judge adolescents in juvenile and adult criminal courts is a timely contribution to the literature on juvenile justice and...

“Equal access to justice” would mean that different groups in a society would have similar chances of obtaining similar resolutions to similar kinds of civil justice problems. If people had equal access to justice, a society’s institutions of remedy would work to equalize how they handled their civil justice problems and to ensure that similar prob...

In the United States, among the most common responses to justiciable problems – non-trivial problems that raise civil legal issues – is to do nothing. The probability of taking no action varies inversely with income, with poor households least likely to take any action to attempt to resolve problems. In focus groups comprised of low- and low-modera...

Lawyers are often criticized for stinting on their responsibilities for public service; nevertheless, their uncompensated provision of legal services to poor people, or pro bono work, provides a substantial part of available civil legal assistance in the United States. Cross-sectional analysis of data from the late 1990s reveals that reliance on pr...

Ted Schneyer's analyses of the politics of the organized bar are an important contribution to our understanding of the public roles of lawyers and of the influence structure within the profession. His work built on and clarified a scholarly literature on interest groups within the profession and on the place of lawyers within political networks. In...

This paper reports on a meta-analysis, or quantitative research synthesis, of more than 14,000 civil cases adjudicated in fourteen different fora in jurisdictions in two common law countries, the United States and the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, and Wales). The landscape of the literature is composed largely of studies of tribunals in which...

Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, Urban Lawyers pr...

Two theories compete to explain the distribution of professional prestige among lawyers. Each theory arises out of a general theory of the social organization of the legal profession. Their disagreement centers on the source of the values that underlie lawyers' prestige order and on the aspects of the division of labor that are consequently salient...

This paper reconsiders James S. Coleman's concept of social capital. The concept has gained wide use and acceptance in,sociology since its first publication, but, Coleman's own writings on the subject remain to date its most extensive analytic treatment. We make two contributions to social capital theory. First, we recast social capital theory to f...

Social capital is’ some aspect of a social structure’ (Coleman 1990: 302) that acts as a resource that individuals may appropriate and use for their own purposes. In this paper, we examine the economic value of ties to local professional elites: specifically, the income returns to Chicago lawyers of contacts among the elite of the Chicago bar. Cont...