“If you think about big public institutions—you can enroll your child in your neighborhood public school without having to use the services of a professional, but you can’t often go to your courthouse and successfully use your own legal procedures without paying a private third party to help you do it,” says Sandefur, 55, who earned her PhD in sociology in 2001.

Sandefur, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation and a native of Oklahoma, started her career at Stanford University, where she taught for nearly a decade before joining the American Bar Foundation in 2010. There, she founded the Access to Justice Research Initiative.

Sandefur wrote the proposals that funded a groundbreaking study of the civil justice experiences of Americans that she says revealed most people didn’t understand their problems were actually legal problems. For this and other research on inequality and access to justice, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.

“There have always been people focused on this research, but Becky has really accelerated not just the amount of research but the scope,” says Ajay Mehrotra, a former executive director of the American Bar Foundation. “Access-to-justice research is now a really prominent field in the legal academy, and she played an important role in building it.”

Sandefur is a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation and a professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, which she joined in 2019. Her current projects include designing a national civil legal needs survey with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and developing a global research and data agenda on people-centered justice.

She also is studying community justice workers, who provide legal assistance in areas where people have limited access to lawyers. This work helped inform another of her ventures: She co-founded Frontline Justice, a national nonprofit organization that mobilizes and trains these advocates. According to Frontline Justice, more than 30 states have passed, proposed or are exploring rules to authorize community justice workers. One of Frontline Justice’s major initiatives is helping to develop training and standards for jurisdictions interested in setting up programs.

“She is the definition of a rebel,” says Matthew Burnett, Frontline Justice’s other co-founder. “Her research has really directed both her continued research interests but also her interest in shaping policy and practice in ways that run against the grain.”

As a testament to the influence of Sandefur’s research, Burnett says the ABA and other national legal organizations have recently called for further study of community justice workers.

Sandefur also has been involved in state access-to-justice efforts, including helping to implement Utah’s legal services regulatory sandbox. She now serves on the Arizona Commission on Access to Justice.

“What I want is a world where everybody can live a good life and be healthy and take care of themselves and the people who depend on them,” says Sandefur, who lives near Phoenix and loves hiking, camping and playing ball with her dog, Gladys. “Access to justice is really critical to that.”