Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing toward justice?

That is the question LawNext host Bob Ambrogi put to Renee Knake Jefferson at the start of today's conversation. Jefferson is a professor of law and the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, and her work sits at the intersection of legal ethics, judicial ethics, lawyer regulation, legal education and access to justice.

She is also the coauthor of the acclaimed book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former co-reporter for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. In 2013, the ABA Journal named her a Legal Rebel for co-founding the ReInvent Law Laboratory at Michigan State together with Daniel Martin Katz. More recently, she was elected to the American Bar Association's Council for the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, the body responsible for accrediting J.D. programs — so, as she puts it, she's gone from offering constructive criticism from the outside to working on the inside

In her "spare time" (as if she possibly has any), she writes the Substack newsletter Legal Ethics Roundup, a weekly review of all things related to legal and judicial ethics.

In today's conversation, Renee and Bob talk in depth about the access to justice crisis and what can be done to narrow the justice gap, including why the biggest barrier to legal help may be that people do not even recognize they have a legal problem. They also discuss the promise and peril of AI as a tool for closing the justice gap, why regulatory reform has not produced the domino effect many once predicted, and what lawyers, law schools, regulators and innovators can each do to move the needle.

Spoiler alert: Jefferson remains a glass-half-full optimist — and by the end of this conversation, you may be too.

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