Access to justice and inequalities: an interview with Professor Rebecca Sandefur

Abstract

Interviewers:Thanks, Rebecca, for taking the time to do this interview. We are very excited to hear about your career and life experience. We would like to start asking when you decided to study sociology and what was in your mind at that point?Rebecca: I decided to study sociology when I was an undergraduate, because I was really interested in inequality, and at that time I was really interested in inequalities that emerge early in kids' lives at school. There's a line of thinking, part of it comes from Pierre Bourdieu, part of it comes from other sorts of cultural Marxist theories about class, that institutions are designed in ways that privilege some groups of people in society over others, so it's not that people have deficits, it's that the institutions are systematically built to serve some people and not others. So, what I decided, in undergraduate school, I was going to study these inequalities in early childhood and education. I found a big research project that had five faculty members and we flew around the country interviewing people, and I attached my dissertation project to this giant project and, when you have five faculty members, it's impressive that you are all speaking to each other, because on our project, they got mad at each other and the entire thing fell apart [LOL]. So I was four years into graduate school, four years into my Ph.D., and I said: "What am I going to do now?" [LOL], I don't have any data. And just by chance someone called me up and said: "I have this project on lawyers and I need a research assistant." I thought: "This is perfect," so I wrote a dissertation about how the careers of American lawyers had changed between the 50s and the 90s, using the labor market theories and stuff like that. In the course of writing that, one thing I noticed is that there's actually a lot of literature on the legal profession, and a lot of it assumes that the legal profession is intrinsically fascinating, "of course we want to know about lawyers!" To me, the main reason we want to know about lawyers was because, at least in our system, you have a public legal system, just like we have a public system of education up to college. In the public system of education, if you live in the community, you can take your kid out to school, drop him off, and the school will educate your kid. Some schools are good, some are not so good, but either way children can enroll and study -it happens. The court system is exactly the same in the sense that it's public, you've already paid for it, staffed it. But at least in the US it's become so inward-looking that you have to hire a private third-party, the legal profession, to help you use your own justice system. So I began to think about how that shapes the way problems play out, the way people understand themselves, how justice works, that kind of thing. That's how I got into access to justice.

The Importance of Inculcating the ‘Pro Bono Ethos’ in Law Students, and the Opportunities to Do It Better

“…130 Another US study in 2009 (with data from a nationally representative survey of early-career attorneys in the US), also found surprisingly little empirical evidence about the relationship between clinical legal education and the practical and professional development of law students. 131 Whilst they found no evidence of a relationship between clinical training experiences and new lawyers' pro bono service, and no consistent evidence of a relationship between clinical training experiences and new lawyers' civic participation, they did find a strong relationship between clinical training and career choice 'for those young attorneys who recall that they came into law hoping to improve society or help individuals'. They noted, that for this group of new lawyers, clinical training may have been an important factor in sustaining or accelerating their original civic commitments.…”

“…As Sandefur and Selbin note: Clinical training's impact is mediated by the nature of the clinic experience itself, the context of the overall law school experience and forces external to legal education that powerfully shape lawyers' attitudes and behaviour. 143 One of those forces external to legal education is the person's intrinsic level of civic commitment. This may be spawned by a person's upbringing, an experience with injustice, perhaps a personal and poignant exposure to a disadvantaged or marginalised person or community, or the satisfaction of achieving a favourable outcome for such a person through the use of the law.…”

Imagens da justiça e concepções curriculares de cursos de direito: Uma análise comparativa entre imagens

“…Desse modo, os estudos sobre acesso à justiça (Connell, 2014;Fraser, 2002Fraser, e 2012Bittar, 2018;Wolkmer, 2019, Igreja e Rampin, 2021) apontam para uma fragilidade deste acesso, no sentido de que apenas algumas pessoas e alguns problemas podem ser solucionados pelo sistema jurídico. Por outro lado, em contraponto ao que se observa na imagem, Igreja e Rampin (2021), inspiradas em contribuições teóricas da destacada pesquisadora sobre o tema do acesso à justiça, da Universidade do Arizona, Rebecca Sandefur (2019), afirmam que os mesmos estudos consideram que a ênfase do acesso à justiça deve se concentrar nas «experiências que as pessoas têm com o sistema de justiça, com as organizações ou instituições, e teria como foco observar quem tem acesso às instituições e que tipo de resultado obtêm» (Igreja e Rampin, 2021: 199).…”