Biography
LSVF Professor in Law and the Co-Director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, Stanford Law School
David Freeman Engstrom is the LSVF Professor in Law and the Co-Director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, the premier academic center working to shape the future of legal services and access to the legal system. A far-ranging scholar of the design and implementation of litigation and regulatory regimes, Engstrom’s expertise runs to civil procedure, administrative law, constitutional law, law and technology, and empirical legal studies.
Professor Engstrom’s current work focuses on access to justice in the millions of low-dollar but highly consequential cases, including debt collection, eviction, foreclosure, and child support actions, that shape the lives of Americans each year. He currently serves as the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication, which will offer courts guidance on the urgent challenges these cases raise. From 2020 to 2022, he served as a public appointee to the California State Bar’s Closing the Justice Gap Working Group, tasked with proposing reforms to foster innovation in legal services.
Another focus is technology’s role in the civil justice system. Engstrom’s projects span court use of technology in sprawling multidistrict litigations (MDLs), lawyer use of “legal tech” tools to serve clients, and a growing menu of technologies designed to assist those without lawyers. Engstrom has published numerous articles on these issues and is the editor of Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice (Cambridge University Press 2023). He also co-founded the Filing Fairness Project, an ambitious collaboration with six states and technology providers to simplify filing systems and eliminate access barriers.
Professor Engstrom’s expertise in law and technology also extends to the legal and policy implications of the “automated state.” In particular, he is an expert on growing government use of AI—a trend that is poised to transform everything from policing, to regulatory enforcement, to the distribution of welfare and other public benefits. During 2018-2020, Engstrom co-led a project at the Administrative Conference of the United States, Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies, which remains the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date.
(source: Stanford Law School)
