R L Sandefur
Biographic Data
| ID | 200422 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R L Sandefur |
| GIVEN NAMES | R L |
| FAMILY NAME | Sandefur |
| SIGNATURE | SANDEFUR R L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2968-7478 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 236 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
All together now
As empirical research into access to justice burgeons around the world, contemporary work offers opportunities for integration and synthesis, generating insights that can inform both policy priorities and practical decisions about program design and implementation. Access to justice is historically a problem-focused research field, but an important strand of contemporary access to justice research focuses on solutions, or a deeper understanding “…
Access to Justice and Legal Services Regulatory Reform
Researchers have launched a new era of studies exploring relationships between legal services regulation and access to justice. These scholarly developments respond to recent changes in how Anglo-American jurisdictions regulate the practice of law, changing who can make money from the practice of law, who can engage in it, and who can direct and control it. Often described as projects of deregulation, most are actually acts of reregulation. This …
Designing Just Solutions at Scale
Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless legal services that breaks away from lawyer-centric logic. Inspired by experiments in rere…
Access to What
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 other groups, like poor people and racial minorities. Traditionally, lawyers and judges call this a “c…
Gender in academic STEM
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 STEM. The majority of our participants revealed gender‐blind perspectives and argued that the egalita…
Commentary on Carroll Seron's Presidential Address
Elements of Professional Expertise
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 work in terms of professional expertise, I conduct a theoretically grounded synthesis of the findin…
Manufacturing Morals
Golden Age,' Quiescence, and Revival
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 under other names in a variety of sociological and interdisciplinary fields. In the process, researc…
Lawyers' Pro Bono Service and American-Style Civil Legal Assistance
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 pro bono may render assistance vulnerable to market pressures in ways both obvious and subtle. In stat…
Work and Honor in the Law
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 in determining prestige. The client-type thesis holds that the profession is organized largely by i…
A Paradigm for Social Capital
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 focus on benefits rather than forms. We identify three benefits that forms of social capital may conf…
A Paradigm for Social Capital
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 focus on benefits rather than forms. We identify three benefits that forms of social capital may conf…
Golden Age,' Quiescence, and Revival
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 under other names in a variety of sociological and interdisciplinary fields. In the process, researc…
Elements of Professional Expertise
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 work in terms of professional expertise, I conduct a theoretically grounded synthesis of the findin…
Work and Honor in the Law
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 in determining prestige. The client-type thesis holds that the profession is organized largely by i…
Access to What
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 other groups, like poor people and racial minorities. Traditionally, lawyers and judges call this a “c…
Lawyers' Pro Bono Service and American-Style Civil Legal Assistance
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 pro bono may render assistance vulnerable to market pressures in ways both obvious and subtle. In stat…
Gender in academic STEM
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 STEM. The majority of our participants revealed gender‐blind perspectives and argued that the egalita…
Designing Just Solutions at Scale
Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless legal services that breaks away from lawyer-centric logic. Inspired by experiments in rere…
Commentary on Carroll Seron's Presidential Address
A Paradigm for Social Capital
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 focus on benefits rather than forms. We identify three benefits that forms of social capital may conf…
Work and Honor in the Law
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 in determining prestige. The client-type thesis holds that the profession is organized largely by i…
Lawyers' Pro Bono Service and American-Style Civil Legal Assistance
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 pro bono may render assistance vulnerable to market pressures in ways both obvious and subtle. In stat…
Golden Age,' Quiescence, and Revival
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 under other names in a variety of sociological and interdisciplinary fields. In the process, researc…
Elements of Professional Expertise
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 work in terms of professional expertise, I conduct a theoretically grounded synthesis of the findin…
Manufacturing Morals
Commentary on Carroll Seron's Presidential Address
Gender in academic STEM
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 STEM. The majority of our participants revealed gender‐blind perspectives and argued that the egalita…
Access to What
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 other groups, like poor people and racial minorities. Traditionally, lawyers and judges call this a “c…
Access to Justice and Legal Services Regulatory Reform
Researchers have launched a new era of studies exploring relationships between legal services regulation and access to justice. These scholarly developments respond to recent changes in how Anglo-American jurisdictions regulate the practice of law, changing who can make money from the practice of law, who can engage in it, and who can direct and control it. Often described as projects of deregulation, most are actually acts of reregulation. This …
Designing Just Solutions at Scale
Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless legal services that breaks away from lawyer-centric logic. Inspired by experiments in rere…
All together now
As empirical research into access to justice burgeons around the world, contemporary work offers opportunities for integration and synthesis, generating insights that can inform both policy priorities and practical decisions about program design and implementation. Access to justice is historically a problem-focused research field, but an important strand of contemporary access to justice research focuses on solutions, or a deeper understanding “…
Sociology (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Legal Education and Practice Innovations (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Economic Justice (5 works) · Law and economics (5 works) · Public relations (5 works) · Legal profession (4 works)