Rebecca Sandefur

{{Infobox academic

|name=Rebecca Sandefur

|title=Professor

|image=

|caption=

|nationality=Chickasaw Nation, American

|education=University of Wisconsin–Madison

|alma_mater=University of Chicago

|discipline=Sociology

|workplaces={{plainlist|

}}

| thesis_title = The Social Organization of Legal Careers

| thesis_url =

| thesis_year = 2001

| main_interests = Justice, social capital, legal careers

| awards = MacArthur Fellowship

| website =

}}

Rebecca Leigh Sandefur is an American sociologist. She is Professor in the School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). At the ABF, she founded the access to justice research initiative in 2010.{{Cite web |url=http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/faculty/profile/31 |title=Rebecca Sandefur - American Bar Foundation |website=www.americanbarfoundation.org |access-date=2018-10-13}} Sandefur also won a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2018 for "promoting a new, evidence-based approach to increasing access to civil justice for low-income communities".{{cite web|url=https://www.macfound.org/fellows/1022/|title=Rebecca Sandefur: Sociologist and Legal Scholar|website=MacArthur Foundation|access-date=October 4, 2018}}

Contributions

Sandefur's research focuses on how low-income Americans consume legal services.{{cite news|url=https://www.chronicle.com/article/Meet-the-Academics-Who-Nabbed/244720|title=Meet the Academics Who Nabbed This Year's MacArthur 'Genius' Grants|work=The Chronicle of Higher Education|first=Julian|last=Wylie|date=October 4, 2018|access-date=October 4, 2018}} The Chicago Tribune described her research on alternative approaches to settling civil justice disputes over housing, employment, and family issues as the kind of scholarship that can sometimes "pass largely unnoticed by the broader culture".{{cite news|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-macarthur-genius-grant-winners-1005-story.html|title=Here are 2018's MacArthur 'genius grant' winners, including an Illinois legal scholar|work=Chicago Tribune|first=Steve|last=Johnson|date=October 4, 2018|access-date=October 4, 2018}} Sandefur is a faculty fellow of the American Bar Foundation, where she leads a research program on access to justice and contributes to research following the career trajectories of people after they earn their Juris Doctor degrees.{{cite news|url=http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/american_bar_foundation_faculty_fellow_legal_luminaries_win_macarthur_fello|title=Access-to-justice work earns MacArthur 'genius grant' for American Bar Foundation faculty fellow

|work=ABA Journal|first=Lorelei|last=Laird|date=October 5, 2018|access-date=October 5, 2018}}

Sandefur is also known for her theoretical work on social capital, including her most-cited publication, the 2000 book chapter "A Paradigm for Social Capital" co-written with Edward Laumann, in which she argues that social capital should be understood in terms of benefits that realize people's goals, rather than only as resources to which people have access.{{cite book|title=Knowledge and Social Capital: Foundations and Applications|editor-last=Lesser|editor-first=Eric L.|chapter=A Paradigm for Social Capital|author1-last=Sandefur|author1-first=Rebecca|author2-last=Laumann|author2-first=Edward O.|date=2000|publisher=Butterworth-Heineman|pages=69–87|isbn=9780750672221}}{{cite web|url=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12073112142456249726|title=Google Scholar Citations: A paradigm for social capital|website=Google Scholar|access-date=October 5, 2018}}

Education and career

Sandefur earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin.{{cite web|url=https://sociology.illinois.edu/directory/profile/sandefur|title=Rebecca L. Sandefur, Associate Professor|website=University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign Department of Sociology|access-date=October 4, 2018}} In 2001 she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on "the social organization of legal careers".{{cite thesis|type=Ph.D.|first=Rebecca|last=Sandefur|title=The Social Organization of Legal Careers|publisher=The University of Chicago|date=2001|oclc=49950641}} She worked for 9 years as faculty in the Stanford University sociology department, then became an associate professor of Sociology and the Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and a fellow at the [http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/index.html American Bar Foundation]. She joined the faculty of Arizona State University in 2019.

Personal life

Sandefur is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation.

Works

{{cite book|title=Access to Justice|editor-first=Rebecca L.|editor-last=Sandefur|publisher=Emerald Group|date=2009|series=Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance|volume=12|isbn=9781848552432}}