Rural access to justice draws significant press coverage

We've seen lots of coverage of access to justice in rural places in the past few weeks, and I'm going to use this post to collect and highlight some of the stories.

Most prominently, the ABA Journal has run its second cover story this decade on the rural lawyer shortage.  This one is by Wendy Davis, and the headline is "No Country for Rural Lawyers."  The last one was by Lorelei Laird and appeared in October 2014.  That story was headlined "In rural America, there are job opportunities and a need for lawyers."  Sadly, these stories, put side by side, suggest that little has changed in five years.  This month's story is more focused on the economic challenges of practicing law in rural America, a matter I have written about here and here.  Indeed, I note that Wendy Davis uses the title my co-author and I selected for my first rural ATJ piece, "Law Stretched Thin" as subhead in her story (and she mentions that 2014 article, though not by name, early on as the source of a data point about 2% of small law practices being in rural America).  Here's what Davis writes under "Stretched Thin" regarding Alaska, which is one of several states from which Davis draws anecdotes:

Vast swaths of Alaska are so remote they are only accessible by plane or boat. Often those areas lack any private attorneys or police officers and jails—a situation prompting Attorney General William Barr to declare a public safety emergency for rural Alaska in January 2019. 

Nelson estimates that the Alaska Legal Services Corp., which represents low-income individuals, turns away one potential client for each one that’s accepted.

I and my students have written about justice in Alaska here and here.  Other states featured in the ABA Journal cover story are Iowa, Arkansas (a rural incubator based at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Bowen School of Law) and South Dakota.  Data from New York and Nebraska are mentioned.  Davis does mention both my (co-authored) Legal Deserts piece, while borrowing that phrase, too, for a subhead. 

Also in this month's ABA Journal (online) is this piece by Pamela Metzger of SMU's Deason Center for Criminal Justice Reform, writing about what it's like to be an urban person (and, ultimately, an urban lawyer) discovering the range of different (and similar) issues implicit in criminal justice reform.  Spoiler alert:  among these is the burden of distance, a challenge that exists with respect to getting access to all sorts of services.

Many of the other rural ATJ (access to justice) issues in the news recently are out of New Mexico, where the state has undertaken a multi-pronged approach to rural access.  Law 360 did a story this week, and before that there were court press releases and a story in the Houston Chronicle and by the Associated Press.  I'll just note that the Chronicle story is surely in part a reflection of the lack of a law school in southern New Mexico or, for that matter, neighboring west Texas.  That practical reality has consequences, as Hannah Haksgaard of the University of South Dakota has commented upon. 

Finally, a January story about rural ATJ in North Dakota is here.