More rural neglect in civil access to justice literature

 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is just out with a new report on civil access to justice, "Civil Justice for All:  A Report and Recommendations from the Making Justice Accessible for All Initiative."  This is a 

The dean of my law faculty brought this report to our community's attention yesterday, on the heels of our chancellor having brought it to the dean's attention.  I had a quick look, of course, to see what it said about rural issues.  As you'll see if you have a look, the word "rural" appears eleven times.  Three of those times are in the context of showing spatial inclusivity, such as this on page 26: 

Civil justice must be fairer, more open, and more accessible, whether in a rural, urban, or suburban area, no matter which state.

A few talk about veterans issues in rural contexts, and one is a gesture to rural poverty--again as the contrast with urban poverty.   Here are the relevant excerpts:

Legal services organizations serving poor rural areas, whether in West Virginia, Montana, or Alaska, face special difficulties in attracting, hiring, and retaining lawyers. They also struggle to help people across a wide geographic area. (p. 13)

* * *  

Also in 2018, about one in four people in rural areas, where people tend to be poorer than other Americans, said that getting access to the Internet was a major problem; in urban areas the rate was about one in seven, and in the suburbs it was one in 11. (p. 23).

* * * 

People at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder will suffer the gravest consequences of this failure: family separations, poor health outcomes, substandard housing and evictions, homelessness, and veterans living on dangerous city streets and in downtrodden rural corners, feeling betrayed and abandoned by the nation they defended. (p. 29)

* * * 

The incidence of health-related problems varies by the type of poor and low-income household—from about 50 percent where people with a disability live; to about 40 percent in rural areas or in households where veterans live; to about 30 percent where seniors (that is, people 65 or older) live. (p. 32)

* * *

Some VA medical-legal partnerships use VA’s “telehealth” system to connect legal services providers by phone or videoconference with veterans in rural areas, who receive online healthcare consultations at community-based outpatient centers. This approach is valuable in all rural areas but especially in parts of states where limited broadband service means veterans are unable to access online civil justice resources from home. (p. 38).

The other uses of the word "rural" are in citations/footnotes.   Overall, I'm very disappointed that this high-profile report gave short shrift to rural access-to-justice issues--and to the scholars who have dedicated significant attention to exploring, analyzing and publicizing them.  I'll concede that this report's gesture to rural is better than no mention of rural at all--which has often been the norm--but the nod here is very superficial.