Instead of having everyone have their problem adjudicated by a judge or settled by two attorneys sitting in a room arguing with each other.

So instead of defining justice by the process by which the result is achieved, what we should care about is the substance of the result that's achieved.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the rule of law

in the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover

some of many of those things for Slate. And this week, we are continuing our summer series on

fascinating legal thinkers you may not yet be that familiar with. And on today's show, we wanted to

tackle an issue that affects just about everybody and yet somehow troubles almost nobody. The issue is

access to civil justice. Now, everybody knows about what happens to Americans who face

criminal proceedings and the ways that their access to an attorney to legal resources will

implicate outcomes in ways that are shaped, of course, by race, by income, by class, by education. But if you are poor and you find yourself caught up in the civil justice system where the outcome of cases are potentially catastrophically life-changing. So we're talking about eviction or loss of custody of your children or wage theft or loss of government or insurance benefits.

In any of those cases, you are more than likely to have to face any of those without legal

representation. In fact, one or more parties lack legal representation in more than three

quarters of the cases filed in any state civil court today. And a 2017 report by the Legal Services

Corporation revealed that the problem is actually getting worse. 86% of the civil legal problems

reported by low-income Americans received zero legal assistance. Our guest today is Rebecca

Sandifer. She's a sociologist and researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

She's been working on issues of access to civil justice for decades. Her research tends to focus on inequality, particularly as it relates to the law.

And in October, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for her work on the topic.

She's also one of three guest editors of a terrific new volume on this topic of access to civil justice that was published this past winter in Daedalus.

That's the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

And it tackled these issues through a whole bunch of lenses. And one of the essays, Rebecca

Sandifers essay, is actually counterintuitive to say the least. So we really wanted to have her on

...