W. Bradley Wendel (Cornell Law) provides a useful counterpoint to a set of chapters focused on mapping the connection between the current regime of legal services regulation and access to justice. His chapter is a passionate defense of the traditional lawyer’s role as a defender of key public values and a bulwark of rule of law. His chapter elegantly reminds readers that lawyers and the legal profession sit at an important crossroads as essential defenders of rule-of-law values that are under attack and yet waning in their market and cultural power.

Rebecca Sandefur (Arizona State) and Mathew Burnett (American Bar Foundation) – one a MacArthur Genius Award-winning sociologist, the other a longtime leader on access-to-justice issues – explore ways to reform legal services regulation, from relaxing UPL rules (to welcome new providers into the system) to relaxing Rule 5.4’s bar on nonlawyer ownership of law firms (to make available new sources of capital investment). After reviewing existing empirical evidence, they argue in favor of the former, in order to spur new human-centered service models, as against longer-term and less proven reforms altering law firm ownership.

Rebecca Aviel (Denver University (Sturm) Law) draws on her deep expertise in family law to illuminate ways in which domestic relations cases are exceptional relative to other legal areas where access concerns are acute. Family law’s exceptionalism, she contends, justifies thoroughgoing changes to that system’s adversarial architecture, such as permitting a single lawyer to represent both sides in a divorce, that are well-tailored to family law even if nonstarters in other parts of the civil justice system. Aviel also suggests that some innovative family law programs might travel well, informing reforms in other civil justice contexts even where they cannot be directly replicated.

Philip G. Peters, Jr. (University of Missouri Law) examines whether nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) offer a promising template for limited license legal professionals. He interrogates the rise of these professions in the medical field, asking, among other things: Do they deliver quality services despite training that is significantly shorter and less expensive than the training of physicians? Do they reduce consumer costs? And do they improve access to care for underserved populations? The chapter also outlines the strategic factors underlying the remarkable success that the NP and PA professions have had, at least until recently, in statehouses across the country and then notes the arguments being made now by physicians against freeing NPs and PAs from all physician oversight. The chapter ends by identifying key lessons from this history for those seeking to create new categories of limited license legal professionals.