Rebecca L. Sandefur is 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. Rebecca won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2018 for promoting a new, evidence-based approach to increasing access to civil justice for low-income communities. 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.
A native of Oklahoma and an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, Professor Sandefur received her BA from the University of Wisconsin and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at UIUC, she served for 9 years on the sociology faculty at Stanford University.
Rebecca Sandefur discusses her research into digital access to justice tools and how they seek to innovate these tools in order to empower people to understand and act on their legal problems.
