Ellie Frazier (she/her) a political science and sociolegal studies scholar whose research and teaching focus broadly on access to justice, social movements, and comparative politics. Her dissertation investigates the political, social, and legal processes through which nonlawyer services emerged and evolved across colonial, authoritarian, and democratic state building in South Africa. By shedding light on these dynamics, Frazier’s dissertation seeks to clarify the opportunities and challenges of integrating non-lawyers into democratic institutions as part of access to justice initiatives; it also broadly highlights how these forms of sociolegal assistance both challenge and reinforce the boundaries of the legal profession.
At the American Bar Foundation, she will broaden her research to encompass different categories of non-lawyers in the United States. Her focus will be on examining the structural and relational factors, including perceptions of legal education and other training pathways, that shape the decisions of non-lawyers to engage in legal work without pursuing a legal degree. By focusing on professionals working in law-related fields but outside the undergraduate to attorney pipeline, she aims to generate new understandings of the interplay between access to legal education and access to justice.
Frazier received her PhD in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, her MA in International Political Economy and Development from Fordham University, and her BA in Anthropology from the University of Virginia.
She has taught courses at Fordham University, UC Santa Cruz, Freie Universität, and the Institute for Legal Practice and Development. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Commission and the National Science Foundation (#2017726). Additionally, she has worked on development projects in West Africa and as a Country Analyst for Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index. Before she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the ABF, Frazier was a participant in the ABF/JPB Access to Justice Research Initiative Early Career Workshop.