Access to What? Rebecca L. Sandefur. © 2019 by Rebecca L. Sandefur doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00534 Rebecca l. Sandefur is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign; and Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, where she founded and leads the Foundation’s Access to Justice re search initiative. She is also a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. Her pub- lications include Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar(with John P. Heinz, Robert L. Nelson, and Edward O. Laumann, 2016) and Access to Justice (ed., 2009)

“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 “crisis of unmet legal need.” It is not. Justice is about just resolution, not legal services. Resolving justice problems lawfully does not always require lawyers’ assistance, as a growing body of evidence shows. Because the problem is unresolved justice issues, there is a wider range of options. Solutions to the access-to-justice crisis require a new understanding of the problem. It must guide a quest for just resolutions shaped by lawyers working with problem-solvers in other disciplines and with other members of the American public whom the justice system is meant to serve.”