The Justice Worker

In September of 2022, the stormy remains of a giant typhoon struck 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline. Waves more than 50 feet tall and winds around 90 miles per hour beat up 40 low-lying communities, ravaging beaches, ripping up roads, and ruining houses. The storm caused fires and power outages, spoiling fish and game that had been cleaned and frozen to last until the following spring. Many people had to skip meals. Some ran through their emergency rations or depended on others for something to eat.

Alaska has only about 740,000 people yet constitutes one-sixth of America’s land: it’s the largest, most sparsely populated state in the nation, and most of it is rural, with only a small fraction of its communities connected by roads. Providing disaster relief to coastal regions such as those affected by the storm can be difficult. As Nikole Nelson, then executive director of the Alaska Legal Services Corporation, said recently, “It’s not an exaggeration to say people were starving”—above all, children and elders.

The federal government’s main program to combat hunger is SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Though supervised by the feds, the program is run by each state, and states often make mistakes about disbursement of those funds by wrongfully denying, suspending, or terminating benefits for households in need. In fiscal year 2019, for example, Alaska’s rate of making such mistakes was 39 percent—above the national average of 34 percent. During FY 2023 (which began on October 1, 2022), the state’s rate jumped to 87 percent—the worst in the country, at almost twice the national average. In the wake of the typhoon, hardships intensified.

With nowhere else to turn, many Alaskans sought legal help. Alaska Legal Services is the only organization of its kind in the state serving, for free, people who are poor or struggling economically, like most in those communities. In the best of times, it can handle only a fraction of the requests it receives for legal aid. In the fall of 2022, the organization was overwhelmed by pleas from people who could not get food through SNAP. Alaska Legal Services employed 28 lawyers, but most of the people who stepped in to help were not lawyers.

In 2019, with approval from the state supreme court, Alaska Legal Services began a program for community justice workers. They aren’t members of the bar and sometimes don’t have a college degree, yet they are trained and certified to help solve civil justice problems by providing legal advice, advocacy, and other kinds of services. The unauthorized practice of law—law work performed by anyone not a lawyer—is a crime in most states and usually a felony. In Alaska, as long as people don’t hold themselves out as lawyers when they aren’t and don’t charge for their services, they can do a lot that would be prohibited in most states. They can even represent clients in court.

Alaska Legal Services enlisted volunteers to help address the state’s SNAP backlog in the teeth of the crisis. About 60 community justice workers were trained, and 50 of them jumped in. They usually got SNAP benefits approved for their clients within 10 days.

The agency’s Joy Anderson and Sarah Carver reported that in 2022, Alaska Legal Services resolved 125 SNAP cases dealing with denials of benefits; in 2023, when a third of the organization’s cases were about SNAP benefits, it resolved 25 times more: 3,093 cases. Justice workers closed almost 500 of those, negotiating with state agents, requesting hearings, and representing clients. They recovered $1.43 million in benefits.

Nikole Nelson had learned about the need for justice workers at a 2016 conference in Washington, D.C., where Rebecca Sandefur, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, gave a talk about the American crisis in access to civil justice. Nelson had been a lawyer in Anchorage for Alaska Legal Services since 1998, when she was 26, and became the agency’s executive director in 2010. She was interested in Sandefur’s ideas but hadn’t met her. Before the talk, Nelson said, she “was totally fangirling.” Afterward, her thinking about legal services work had been transformed.

People who are poor or struggling for money and economic stability, Sandefur emphasized, and who lack help in addressing legal problems, often suffer shattering consequences. They lose “their homes, their jobs, custody of their children, or access to insurance, benefits, or pensions.” They default on financial obligations and forfeit legal rights. They encounter problems with their health and aren’t properly nourished. They face other deficits and defeats—such as getting hammered by a natural disaster—that are exceedingly difficult to recover from.

Sandefur reported that at any moment, “as many as half of American households”—considerably more than 100 million Americans—were experiencing at least one significant civil justice problem, “many involving basic human needs.” Sandefur now estimates that Americans face at least 150 million new civil justice problems each year, based on a survey by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System and the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law. The most common problems are related to consumer debt, health care, housing, and financial assistance.

Problems can arise from unpaid government benefits associated with SNAP and unemployment. From unsafe rental housing, unfair civil fines, overdue wages, and hounding from debt collectors. From the need to obtain a restraining order against an abuser or the need for elder care or the need to obtain legal guardianship of an aging or ill relative or a young one without a parent. And from many other distresses. The crisis is vast. It is persistent. And it is growing every year.

The Legal Services Corporation, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress since 1974, is the country’s major financial supporter of legal services. The corporation provides an average of one-third of the funding for 130 organizations, including Alaska Legal Services. But the corporation has often been embattled, accused of being anticapitalist, socialistic, or too progressive. It has regularly failed to get from Congress the money it seeks.

Its appropriation for FY 2024 was $560 million. In March, Congress extended the current level of funding through September. Because of inflation, the purchasing power of the corporation’s funding is now worth only about two-thirds of what it was 30 years ago. Add in the growth of the U.S. population since then, and the corporation’s funding per individual is now worth only half as much.

The corporation helps keep the access crisis from being an outright catastrophe, but that is a dismal standard. Of the roughly 1.3 million lawyers in the United States, only around 10,000—about three-fourths of one percent—are full-time legal services lawyers. The American Bar Association says they are among the country’s lowest-paid lawyers.

About 50 million people were eligible for help from the corporation in 2022—about one-sixth of the U.S. Those who sought aid received an inadequate amount or none at all for 92 percent of their “significant civil legal needs,” the National Opinion Research Center reported. Only eight percent of those needs were adequately addressed. That colossal rate of failure greatly understates the problem.

Scores of millions of others can’t afford to pay a lawyer but earn more than the eligibility cap set by Congress for free legal services, which is strikingly low, at 125 percent of federal poverty levels. In 2022, except in Alaska and Hawaii (where the numbers averaged 20 percent higher), individuals in the United States making more than $16,988 a year or families of four making more than $34,688 were not eligible. Some legal services organizations don’t take federal funding because the 125 percent cap leaves out far too many people: they set their own cap at 400 percent of federal poverty levels. In 2022, the higher cap covered 58 percent of the American population, about 193.3 million people.

And raising the cap solves only part of the access crisis. Most people with an urgent need don’t realize they can seek recourse in the law, so they don’t even try. “Among poor Americans,” Sandefur said in that 2016 speech in Washington, “one of the most common responses to civil justice problems is to do nothing at all.” Many are so inured to their exposure to emergencies that, in her words, they accept their adversity as “part of God’s plan.” Sandefur has studied that perplexing reality more than anyone else. When she first published her finding in 2012, no one else in the field was thinking the way she was. To her, the “left behind”—poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans who need help in getting access to legal services—include many millions of people who don’t seek assistance.

Sandefur’s D.C. presentation motivated Nelson: “I was, like, ‘Exactly—that is exactly what I’ve been experiencing my entire career as a legal aid lawyer.’ It was the first time that I heard somebody articulate what I had been seeing in the field for a very long time.”

For Nelson, an upsetting part of her work was having to ration justice: saying no to people who needed help. She said, “Nobody goes into legal aid because they want to turn people away.” Listening to Sandefur, Nelson thought to herself, “Oh, we will never get on top of this problem by just adding more lawyers to the mix and additional funding for civil legal aid.”

Nelson asked Sandefur to help Alaska Legal Services develop the justice worker program and persuade the Alaska Supreme Court to allow justice workers to give clients legal advice and represent them in court. The supreme court granted that request at the end of 2022—soon after the remnants of the typhoon hit the state. “I don’t think that would’ve happened without her,” Nelson said about Sandefur, “without her ideas and without her support as a counselor, but also as a champion.” What she has done in Alaska, she is doing in many other places—work that has made her, during the past decade, the most influential thinker and doer in the effort to improve access to civil justice in America.

Rebecca Sandefur was born in 1970 in Norman, Oklahoma. Her parents, both 19 at the time, had married the year before. “We used to joke that we all grew up together,” she said. She is plainspoken and introduces herself as Becky. Her good-humored irony sheathes the sharpness of her thoughts and the decisiveness of her sense of right and wrong. Her friendly voice and midwestern directness reinforce her neighborliness—her kindness and generosity, her empathy, her concern that you get her meaning. Those qualities also veil her resolve.

While attending the University of Oklahoma, her father worked as a night manager at an Arby’s. Her mother worked as a secretary at the university’s law school. When Sandefur was four, the family moved to California, where her father got his PhD in sociology at Stanford. Her younger brother, Conner, was two when the family moved back to Norman, where her father became a professor at the university. When Sandefur was 13, it was on to Madison, where her father accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin, eventually rising from professor to dean of its College of Letters and Science.

Through his mother, her father is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in south-central Oklahoma. Sandefur and her brother extend the line as descendants of Native Americans forced to move from ancestral lands in the American Southeast to Indian Territory. Her grandmother was on the Chickasaw Council of Elders, which provides advice to the tribe about how to sustain its language, preserve its culture, and repatriate remains of its citizens buried elsewhere.

Sandefur’s grandmother dropped out of high school. When she was about 40, she earned her GED. She then went to a community college to qualify as an elementary school teacher, with financial support from the tribe. That allowed her to “have a very different kind of life: access to things like retirement benefits and health insurance and that kind of good stuff,” Sandefur said. The tribe also paid for her father to go to college: “The lives of generations in our family have been different because of those small investments in those two people.”

In Madison, starting in ninth grade, Sandefur needed about a year and a half to catch up with other students in reading and writing. “Many of the people I went to school with, in Wisconsin, were either the children of college professors or of state professional employees,” she said, “which was very different from Norman, Oklahoma.” High school was a watershed; it was where she learned to “read and write and think like an adult.” She became a National Merit Scholar, earning enough credits to finish in three years.

For two years, she went to Agnes Scott College, a liberal arts school near Atlanta, then returned to Madison to finish her B.A. at the University of Wisconsin, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She knew by then that she wanted to be a scholar.

She mulled over the idea of going to grad school in English, because she loved the epic poem Beowulf, about the warrior who defeats the monster Grendel. She thought it might be fun to spend a career contemplating that kind of text. Her undergraduate work with the sociologist Robert M. Hauser, however, drew her to studying America’s social problems. After graduating, she worked as a Kelly temp for a year and a half, typing documents while figuring out her path. Ultimately, she chose to get her PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago. She “wanted to be able to work on problems that mattered,” problems she could “take action on.”

Her first major work as a sociologist was on the American legal profession, and it framed her understanding of the access crisis.

She cowrote a groundbreaking book that exposed the growing pains of the bar during the late 20th century and the strains it endured when business and finance experienced a surge in globalization. Published in 2005, Urban Lawyers: The New Social Structure of the Bar examined the Chicago bar as representative of the American bar as a whole.

The book told how a “largely undifferentiated mass” of solo legal practitioners morphed in the 20th century: many lawyers still worked alone, but others began practicing in groups. Some firms had tens of lawyers, others (toward the end of the century) employed hundreds, and the largest (eventually) had a thousand or more. She explained why lawyers’ specialties dictated their status—“the prestige with which other lawyers rated different areas of law,” as she put it. Whether their clients were large corporations, unemployed workers, or something in between, the type of client determined how much—or little—prestige, power, and money lawyers amassed.

Beginning in the 1970s, the work of the American bar also changed immensely. Throughout the United States, lawyers in private practice spent a larger share of their time on work for corporations and a smaller share on work for individuals. As dollar values of corporate mergers and deals of other kinds skyrocketed, so did the size, profits, and worldwide influence of American law firms serving big business and major finance. Much greater money, power, and prestige flowed to lawyers for large corporations and finance firms than to lawyers representing individuals with personal problems.

In Chicago, as happened in other major American cities from 1975 to 1995, the number of lawyers almost doubled. In the 1970s alone, the number of lawyers nationwide grew by 76 percent, the fastest rate in any decade from 1900 until today. Barriers to entry into the legal profession lowered: women and people of color made up larger shares of bar membership than ever before. Inside the bar, however, high barriers remained. The profession’s rungs amounted to well-defined classes, with lawyers in those divisions, according to Urban Lawyers, inhabiting “separate social worlds.”

Sandefur and her coauthors realized that the lofty status enjoyed by lawyers for the rich and influential had a devastating, largely unrecognized consequence. The least prestigious work that lawyers did, by the values that had come to predominate in the profession, was to help individuals and families without much money deal with their personal problems—troubles that emerge “at the intersection of civil law and everyday adversity,” as Sandefur put it. Most lawyers spurned the work, deterred by its low pay and low status. A tiny fraction got done compared with what there was to do. What lawyers didn’t do to help address economic and social inequality contributed to the worsening of the problem.

Sandefur had started as one of dozens of research assistants on the book and vaulted to academic prominence as a coauthor with three senior male colleagues. Having written her dissertation on the social organization of legal careers, she became an assistant professor at Stanford and planned to continue writing about the labor market for lawyers from the perspective of theory-oriented sociology. That was her pathway to tenure.

But the implications of the findings published in Urban Lawyers came to obsess Sandefur. “The closer you come to doing anything useful for any concrete human being, you often get paid less,” she said recently, “but you definitely get less respect within your own profession.” It wasn’t just that lawyers’ criteria for success meant that many people lacked representation and floundered. Lawyers’ prohibition against anyone practicing law without having passed the bar kept almost everyone who was not a lawyer from helping people deal with justice-related adversity. Those realities locked masses of people outside the law’s protection.

Sandefur concluded that “Equal Justice Under Law,” chiseled on the façade of the U.S. Supreme Court and, in Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s words, “the most inspiring ideal of our society,” was unattainable in the American legal systems, plural. John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann, influential sociologists and coauthors with Sandefur and Robert L. Nelson of Urban Lawyers, wrote in a previous book that the United States had two legal professions: “two systems of justice, separate and unequal.”

Sandefur wanted to come up with solutions to that problem. She recognized that her scholarship would be deemed unorthodox and reduce the odds of her getting tenure at Stanford. She didn’t get tenure—and, she allowed, she “was very cranky for about a year and a half.” But she carried on with her quest.

Her project is to change the country’s way of addressing a central aspect of American inequality, which has grown considerably in the past generation: from a legal problem, unsolvable without lawyers, to a justice problem, sometimes solvable best by lawyers because of their expertise when it’s essential—but much more often, without them.

Sandefur’s first scholarly article, written when she was a grad student in 1998, was about the idea of social capital. She was the lead author, cowriting with Edward O. Laumann. It’s a work of orthodox sociology—a way of thinking about a big concept. Social capital is a set of hard-to-quantify features of social relations, like norms and networks, which lead to persuasion, cooperation, and connectedness among individuals and groups.

An influential article published a decade earlier had addressed social capital as a quality, like trust, that an individual or group either has or does not. Instead, Sandefur and Laumann presented social capital as a resource that can be exchanged, like money, and can decrease or increase in value. They concentrated on how it functions: sometimes it’s a liability, which undermines trust; usually it’s a benefit, which adds to trust, providing information or building influence.

Sandefur’s work in the field of civil justice access is an example of how social capital functions as a positive force. She has written or cowritten about 80 or so sociology articles, law review articles, committee reports, and other publications—not counting podcasts she has done, media reports she has featured in, and major speeches she has given. Each item is a coordinate on an imaginary map of her campaign: how she has developed, employed, and built her social capital, and why others have added theirs to hers.

The concept of the justice worker caught Sandefur’s attention at a 2006 academic conference in Ireland. She learned about people sometimes called McKenzie Friends, who aren’t lawyers but provide “reasonable assistance” in legal matters; the precedent was established in a 1970 British court ruling in the divorce case of McKenzie v. McKenzie. Many of these McKenzie Friends work in family law, in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and Canada—countries where rules governing the practice of law allow people who aren’t lawyers to do what, in most American states, only lawyers can.

In 2010, Sandefur moved from Stanford to the Chicago-based American Bar Foundation, the national bar’s independent research arm, for which she started the Access to Justice Research Initiative. The next year, she joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she got tenure in 2013. In 2018, she received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for “promoting a new, evidence-based approach” to expanding access to justice.

Now 54, Sandefur is a professor at Arizona State University, a position she has held since 2019. She remains part of the American Bar Foundation, where she launched and directs the Access to Justice Scholars Program, nurturing a growing cohort of thinkers while continuing to build a wide network of people who are working on the problem.

She has also played a major role in convincing prominent bar leaders that the legal profession “can no longer maintain a monopoly over work that it has long failed to perform,” as David F. Levi and coauthors wrote in a 2019 article called “Reclaiming the Role of Lawyers as Community Connectors.” Levi, dean emeritus at Duke Law School and a former federal judge, is president of the American Law Institute, a century-old nonpartisan research organization of the bar’s elite.

For Sandefur, the new American vocation of justice workers is in the public service tradition of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the New Frontier’s Peace Corps, the Great Society’s Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Clinton administration’s AmeriCorps—but with important differences. Instead of being top down and government run, the vocation operates from the bottom up. The authority to certify workers as well as train them rests with the states, so the model has the potential to be sustainable even if it doesn’t attract major federal support. Instead of working for short stints, workers have the option of doing so for a long period. Instead of traveling to help in places they don’t know and where they aren’t known, workers can serve people where they live.

The model addresses the two nubs of the access crisis: restriction, with “only some kinds of justice problems” getting “lawful resolution,” as Sandefur put it; and inequity, with wealthy and white people “consistently more likely to get access than other people, like poor people and racial minorities.” Sandefur defines the vocation loosely to allow for a variety of approaches: justice workers paid by legal services groups; law students gaining practical experience; retirees participating in an “encore project”; employees of nonprofits dealing with health, housing, and other core social needs; and social workers, nurses, public health workers, librarians, teachers, clergy members, and others whose justice-work training expands the skills they bring to their day jobs.

Trust is essential to the mission. In this era of profound American polarization, when people contest what is true as vehemently as what is just, the default mindset seems to be mistrust—of government, institutions in general, the other. The trust that social workers, nurses, and others have earned in their communities serves as a powerful counterforce that can help expand the vocation of justice workers. Think of a building made with service panels and wiring that can handle a much higher load of electricity than is needed when the building opens, in anticipation of greater need in the future.

Sandefur doesn’t call the vocation a profession, to avoid the stigma she associates with use of that term. As she and a colleague wrote, the legal profession often functions as “a monolithic, money-seeking, and monopolistic guild that fails to meet even the basic justice needs of everyday Americans.” The justice worker, meanwhile, is concerned with helping people attain decent, secure, stable, and safe lives. “You work a case under the supervision of an attorney,” she said. “They make sure you know what you’re doing, and then you’re out into the world doing your justice work.”

In March 2024, Lauren Custer, a 36-year-old mother of four and foster mother of one in Fairbanks (population 30,000), joined Alaska Legal Services as a justice worker. She had been a paralegal for 11 years, supporting lawyers, helping victims of domestic and sexual assault and human trafficking get protective orders and meet other needs. The idea of managing her own caseload as a justice worker appealed to her, “to set my own daily expectations—it’s on me and I’m the case handler.”

Of her average of 45 cases, at least 35 involve helping people get public benefits: SNAP, Medicaid (including prenatal care), and housing assistance. She checks in with about half her clients each workday, by email or phone, or sometimes in person at a soup kitchen. She lets them know how their cases are progressing, or that she hasn’t forgotten them. She described her job as “bridging that gap to justice that most people in the populace that we serve have a very hard time doing.”

Sara Freeman, 24, joined Alaska Legal Services as a justice worker in April 2024. She had come to Alaska from Georgia after college as an AmeriCorps member with the Alaska Public Defender Agency, helping clients behind bars access medical treatment and other social services. For a year, she worked near Anchorage, the state’s capital and major city (population 286,000). As her AmeriCorps year ended, the agency offered her a similar job as a paralegal in Nome (population 3,700), 540 miles to the northwest. “Nome looked really cool, so I took it,” she said, “and fell in love with it.”

Part of her job was referring clients with civil needs to Alaska Legal Services, and over two years, she got to know the agency well enough to apply for a job there. “Nome is always suffering from a lack of attorneys,” she said, and “being a lay advocate fills that gap a little bit.” Most of her cases involve SNAP benefits and other forms of public assistance. Her job, she said, is “making justice more accessible” in the most basic way—for people otherwise isolated by weather and wilderness.

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed longstanding weaknesses in American civil society, with both justice systems stretched to their limits. Courts moved from physical courtrooms to online platforms, hearing only emergency cases and allowing massive backlogs to pile up. Legal services offices were overwhelmed.

Their cases dealt with problems such as layoffs and denials of unemployment claims; evictions and other housing and landlord-tenant disputes; price gouging and harassing debt collection; abuses of all kinds (of children, domestic partners, and the elderly); immigration miseries stemming from government-imposed delays on visas; a lack of safe shelters for homeless people; increased racial discrimination; and the need for guardianships of those severely ill with Covid and for advanced health directives. The explosion of civil legal problems upended the lives of countless people—but it stirred innovation.

Among the many groups that had invited Sandefur to speak in the few years before the pandemic—including Congress and the World Bank—none was more important than the Conference of Chief Justices: it’s made up of the top judicial officers of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and some American territories. In 2018, she presented her case to the chiefs in a talk titled “The True Legal Needs of the Public.”

In 2020, the conference adopted a resolution (“Urging Consideration of Regulatory Innovations Regarding the Delivery of Legal Services”) that included “the authorization and regulation of new categories of legal service providers.” The conference urged the gatekeepers—the courts led by members of the conference—to open the gates.

Echoing Sandefur’s findings over the previous decade and a half was a series of whereas clauses. One stated, “WHEREAS, traditional solutions to reducing the access to justice gap, such as increased funding for civil legal aid, more pro bono work, or court assistance programs have had some success, but are not likely to resolve the gap, which is only increasing in severity,” it was time for the addition of people such as justice workers.

Beginning that year, a cluster of states began to remove barriers to justice workers through exceptions in their unauthorized-practice-of-law rules. The Arizona Supreme Court authorized domestic violence legal advocates to provide some legal advice about protective orders and family law—following the justice worker model. In 2021, the Utah Supreme Court, through an experiment of the court and the state bar, authorized Holy Cross Ministries to train its community health workers as medical debt legal advocates, or justice workers, and provide legal advice about dealing with debt—including to undocumented people, who, by law, are prohibited from receiving counsel from legal services lawyers. In 2022, the Delaware Supreme Court adopted a rule authorizing the qualified tenant advocate program, a version of the justice worker model, and in 2023, the state legislature passed a law creating a right to representation in eviction proceedings and requiring that any tenant household earning under 200 percent of the federal poverty line must be represented by a lawyer or a qualified tenant advocate.

Also in 2022, the Alaska Supreme Court endorsed the state’s community justice workers program by adopting the broadest waiver of restrictions to date in any state. It allows justice workers to provide help to clients in court proceedings and widens the scope of problems that justice workers are able to address. As Alaska’s communities identify other needs and as workers demonstrate proficiency in dealing with them, the program can expand quickly.

Justice workers now help Alaskans draft wills, defend themselves against harassing debt collection and small claims lawsuits, obtain protective orders against people who commit domestic violence, and secure unemployment benefits and funds for food. They can also help tribal members benefit from the Indian Child Welfare Act.

As of this April, 190 justice workers were working in 41 Alaskan communities. About a third were Alaska Natives—Aleuts, Northern Eskimos (Inupiat), Southern Eskimos (Yuit), Interior Indians (Athabascans), and Southeast Coastal Indians (Tlingit and Haida). About one quarter were employed or recommended by a tribe (or a tribal nonprofit). About a fifth worked in health care or social services. Another fifth were law students.

In 2023, the Arizona and Utah supreme courts authorized in their respective states the extension of their justice worker models to housing-stability legal advocates. Also that year, Sandefur and Matthew Burnett, who were working together at the American Bar Foundation’s Access to Justice Research Initiative, cofounded Frontline Justice, a nonprofit that describes itself as “a bipartisan national project to democratize access to justice.” It launched with $2 million in philanthropic support. The allusion to battle—frontline—is a reminder of the life-defining stakes for many with civil justice problems.

Frontline Justice’s advisory board includes conservative and liberal leaders, with members in the fields of business, labor, law, medicine, public health, and religion, and some who work with immigrants and people with disabilities. In an era when partisan collaboration has broken down, the organization’s work is an example of cooperation and civic innovation. Sandefur is a cochair of the organization, with John Bridgeland and Cecilia Muñoz, former directors of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively.

When Frontline Justice was looking for a CEO, Nikole Nelson (executive director of Alaska Legal Services) applied. “I said, ‘Look, if there’s somebody better to do this, please take them. But there’s nobody who believes in this more than I do.’ ” She emphasized that “the justice worker model has the potential to scale in ways that nothing else had that I saw in 25 years in legal aid.” From a strong field of candidates, she got the job. As Sandefur said of Nelson: “She has this wonderful expression: ‘You have to move at the speed of trust.’ ”

Nelson leads a virtual organization from Anchorage, with colleagues in Brooklyn, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and other parts of the country. Throughout 2024, she traveled in the Lower Forty-Eight to build Frontline Justice, “socialize the justice-worker concept, and try to move forward the kinds of regulations or rules that exist in Alaska and Arizona and Utah that will clear space for justice workers to get a foothold and help address the justice gap.”

Two of the most important moves happened in Texas, where the state supreme court issued a draft rule allowing for versions of justice worker programs. Approval is expected this year. The state’s Access to Justice Foundation announced Moonshot Grants totaling $13.4 million over three years to six nonprofits that will “help launch a Community Justice Workers (CJW) Program to expand access to legal services for low-income Texans using trained lay advocates to provide limited-scope civil legal services.”

Sandefur helped develop the grants and the program. The foundation gave her a $1.6 million contract to study the Texas Moonshot Grants in a new Justice Worker Lab at Arizona State University.

As Nelson wrote in an email, “Texas is not an outlier state like some may consider Alaska to be. It has a huge population and a mix of urban and rural communities.” Buy-in from the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Access to Justice Foundation was “a next level indication that the movement has legs beyond rural communities.”

In July 2024, at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Closing the Justice Gap,” Ronald S. Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation, endorsed the justice worker model. He said that the corporation is investing in it as “a promising innovation that has already shown tangible success.”

As of May, eight states have authorized some version of justice workers. The Texas plan was pending, and at least 20 other states, as well as the District of Columbia, were considering some version of the program. California’s proposal would allow the state’s more than 100 legal services organizations “to deploy Community Justice Workers.”

Sandefur regards the crisis in civil justice access as a failure of democracy—one that goes back to the shaping of the modern American legal profession about a century ago. The supremacy of market forces in determining how lawyers operate and the lack of prestige for lawyers who tend to people who aren’t rich make for a tenacious bias against providing equal access to civil justice. The profession became a large contributor to the inequality that, by dozens of measures, has gotten worse in the past half-century—despite the country’s overall prosperity. The legal historian Robert W. Gordon wrote, “In no profession is the gulf greater between ideals and practices than it is for lawyers.”

But the Constitution made the United States a rule-of-law country to “establish Justice” and “promote the general Welfare,” among other objectives. To accomplish those objectives, the Constitution establishes American law as a primary and indispensable public good. “We the People of the United States,” the preamble begins, with the first three words calligraphed in much larger letters for emphasis. American law’s principal task is to make government, including the law itself, work fairly on behalf of the people. “Justice workers enable people to use their law,” Sandefur explained. “Their relationship to government and law is changed through the experience of working on their own justice issues.”

She observed that the “law is a big public thing. In our country, for whatever reason, we have this very strange system where, if you want to use your own big public thing, you usually have to hire a private expert to navigate what’s already yours.” Lawyers control the practice of law, so their values play a commanding role in determining what is important in law and who can solve problems involving law, even though the law belongs to the public, not to lawyers.

“Law in a democracy is supposed to be a fundamentally, universally accessible thing,” she said. “When it’s not, it isn’t just that people face unfair and unnecessary suffering that increases inequality. Democracy doesn’t work if people can’t participate in the ordering of their own lives. Substantial groups of people can’t do that.”

The existence of separate and unequal legal systems makes it impossible for a vast number of people to engage with law and legal institutions as citizens. They live outside the law’s protection. That deepens their sense of powerlessness, as does their social and economic vulnerability. “That’s just not democracy,” Sandefur said. The government, founded and extolled as a system of laws—of, by, and for the people—has, for a large share of them, not provided civil justice. The potential of justice workers is to help do that for tens of millions, even a hundred million, more Americans.