Stephen Daniels is a Research Professor Emeritus at the American Bar Foundation. His ABF research project, Alternative Legal Professionals, examines legal technician programs, which license non-lawyers to practice certain aspects of law in a limited capacity with the goal of expanding access to legal services at a more affordable cost. In this feature, Daniels discusses how this concept emerged, spread, and continues to evolve across multiple states.

Carol A. Heimer is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and a Professor of Sociology Emerita at Northwestern University. In this feature, Heimer discusses findings from her forthcoming book, Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine (University of Chicago Press), a comparative study of the “legalization” of American medicine and the broad impact on the role of law in medicine, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in HIV/AIDS clinics in the United States, Uganda, South Africa, and Thailand.

Sonya Rao is a linguistic and legal anthropologist who examines working conditions in multilingual legal spaces. At the ABF, she is investigating the current state of training to communicate across languages in clinical legal education. In this feature, Rao discusses inadequate language services in legal settings, the unequal distribution of work among bilingual law students in legal clinics, and proposes ways to improve collaboration between legal and language professionals.