Albert H. Yoon

Albert H. Yoon, Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, will write a series of articles illuminating the relationship between legal representation and social inequality in the United States and Canada. Yoon hypothesizes that vast disparities in the quality of legal representation impose not only private costs on individual litigants, but also considerable costs on society as a whole, exacerbating and even creating social inequality along a number of dimensions. Yoon will combine qualitative and quantitative data, including extensive interviews with judges and lawyers. This data will allow social scientists to think structurally and institutionally about how to reduce disparities in both the civil and criminal context, and to consider how such measures will address broader areas of social inequality.