Rebecca Sandefur University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rebecca Sandefur is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Foundation’s access to justice research initiative. In 2013, she was the Hague Visiting Chair in the Rule of Law, affiliated with The Hague Institute for the Internationalization of Law. In 2015, she was named Champion of Justice by the National Center for Access to Justice. Sandefur’s research focuses on inequality, particularly as it relates to law, including the Roles Beyond Lawyers project, a study of emerging models that use trained nonlawyers to provide services traditionally available only from lawyers. Her scholarship includes investigations of work and inequality in the legal profession and other professional occupations, lawyers’ pro bono service and its contributions to legal aid, and studies of ordinary people’s experiences with common problems that could bring them into contact with the civil justice system. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.