Ep 097: Lauren Sudeall on Legal Deserts and Other Obstacles to Access to Justice

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A</span> <a href= "https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2020/07/new-aba-report-on-the-profession-profiles-nations-legal-deserts-with-few-or-no-lawyers.html"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">recent report</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">from the American Bar Association portrayed the nation’s legal deserts – large swaths of the country in which there are few or no lawyers. That report followed from a</span> <a href= "https://works.bepress.com/lauren_lucas/32/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">2018 paper</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">published in the</span> <em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Harvard Law & Policy Review</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">that documented these legal deserts and rural America’s increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our guest this week is one of the authors of that paper,</span> <a href= "https://law.gsu.edu/profile/lauren-sudeall/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Lauren Sudeall</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">, associate professor of law and founding faculty director of the</span> <a href= "https://law.gsu.edu/faculty-centers/center-for-access-to-justice/"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Center for Access to Justice</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">at Georgia State University College of Law. We talk about legal deserts and about Sudeall’s other research, in which she focuses on access to the courts, in both the civil and criminal contexts, and on how lower-income individuals navigate the legal system, either with or without the help of a lawyer.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, Sudeall clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt. She then worked at the</span> <a href= "https://www.schr.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Southern Center for Human Rights</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">in Atlanta, fir