Rebecca Sandefur

Rebecca L. Sandefur is Professor in the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics and (by courtesy) in the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. She previously served as Director of the Sanford School.

Sandefur’s scholarship examines access to civil justice from multiple perspectives: how legal services are delivered and experienced; how civil legal aid systems are organized across the United States; the role of pro bono service; the comparative effectiveness, sustainability, and scalability of lawyers, helpers who are not lawyers, and digital tools; and how ordinary people understand and attempt to resolve their justice problems. In addition to her appointment at ASU, she is a Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded the Access to Justice Research Initiative in 2010.

Her public service includes appointment by the Supreme Court of Arizona to the Arizona Commission on Access to Justice. She is also the co-founder, with Matthew Burnett, of Frontline Justice, a national, nonpartisan organization working to address the U.S. civil justice crisis by supporting a movement of community justice workers, and the Justice Worker Lab, a research initiative dedicated to designing, testing, and scaling community-based justice worker programs that expand access to civil legal help.

Sandefur has received numerous honors for her contributions to research and reform. In 2013, she held The Hague Visiting Chair in the Rule of Law. She was named Champion of Justice by the National Center for Access to Justice in 2015 and awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018 for her work on inequality and access to justice. In 2020, she received the Warren E. Burger Award from the National Center for State Courts. She was elected to the Sociological Research Association in 2024. In 2026, the ABA Journal named her a “Legal Rebel” in recognition of her pioneering research on America’s access to justice crisis and her leadership in co-founding Frontline Justice.

Born in Oklahoma, Sandefur is an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.