Professor Lauren D. Sudeall

Lauren Sudeall joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2023 and serves as director of the Vanderbilt Access to Justice (AtJ) Initiative. Her research focuses on access to the courts, both civil and criminal, and how lower-income individuals engage with the legal system, either with a lawyer or on their own. Her earlier work has also included the relationship between rights and identity and the intersection of constitutional law and criminal procedure. Sudeall’s scholarship has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and Yale Law Journal Forum, among other publications.

Before joining the academy, Sudeall clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court of the United States. She then worked at the Southern Center for Human Rights--first as a Soros Justice Fellow and later as a staff attorney--where she represented indigent capital clients in Alabama and Georgia and litigated civil claims regarding the right to counsel.

Sudeall is a member of the American Law Institute and currently serves as an Associate Reporter for Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication. She has also served on the Southern Center’s board of directors, the ABA Standing Committee on Legal Aid & Indigent Defendants, the Indigent Defense Committee of the State Bar of Georgia, and as chair of the AALS Section on Constitutional Law.

Sudeall graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she served as treasurer of the Harvard Law Review, and received her B.A. with distinction from Yale University.