Accessing Justice Through Technology: An Interview with Professor David Engstrom

Abstract

David Freeman Engstrom is a nationally recognized expert and award-winning scholar in civil procedure, administrative law, and constitutional law. His current work focuses on the intersection of law and artificial intelligence. He is working on a project on the effects of continuing advances in “legal tech” on the civil justice system and the governance, lawyering, and access to justice challenges posed by AI. As part of that work, he is serving on the State Bar of California’s Closing the Justice Gap Working Group, tasked with proposing reforms to foster innovative legal service delivery systems. During 2018-2020, he served as a principal advisor to the Administrative Conference of the United States on the project, Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies, which garnered national media attention and remains the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date. 

At Stanford, Professor Engstrom co-directs the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession. From 2018 to 2021, he served as an Associate Dean at Stanford Law School and led an initiative charting the school’s future work around digital technology. He is a faculty affiliate at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab), and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, where he also chairs the Technology Policy Governance committee.

Beyond teaching and research, Engstrom has served as counsel or consultant to a wide range of public and private entities and is a frequent amicus before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a faculty affiliate at the Stanford Human-Centered AI Initiative and at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. from Yale University.