A rural judge's commentary on Michele Statz's article on rural judging

The commentary, by the Honorable David E. Ackerson, was published a few days ago by the Rural Reconciliation project.  I'll provide just a short excerpt here:  

I was a Minnesota state trial judge of general jurisdiction for 36 ½ years in the same small town where I grew up. I have been retired for almost three years. So I have lots of stories, although nobody pays much attention anymore, and my jokes are apparently not as funny as they used to be. At the same time, I find my perspective refreshingly unfettered by any allegiances to the “system.”

Dr. Statz, from her title to her conclusion, speaks of “shared suffering” as a point of intimacy between rural judges and those individual parties, mostly indigent and pro-se, who come before the judges in the rural northern courts. The word “suffering” derives etymologically from the Latin “sufferre,” to bear from below. When Dr. Statz connects rural justice with “Subaltern Cosmopolitan Legality,” bottom-up rather than top-down, she is right on. Further: the etymology of “compassion” is suffer with. Thus, at the very base of her thesis of what makes rural justice work is this idea of compassion, of subjective, relational empathy and kindness. And more further: the same Latin root, “patientia” is plainly revealed in “patience”, which in my view is the better part of the wisdom, Sophia, that mates with the word of law, Logos, and thus in the manner of the iconic statue of Lady Justice, leads to true, restorative justice. This is deep truth, and I most wholeheartedly thank Dr. Statz for her work in beginning to reveal this truth in a professional, courageous, creative, and I submit ground-breaking manner.

Dr. Statz directly confronts the urban-centric hegemony and epistemology of the system and how they burden rural justice. She speaks incisively and eloquently of a judicial approach that she describes as commonsensical, ad hoc, deeply intimate; an emerging alternative to top-down hegemony, “born of shared suffering and power-filled resistance.” She endows her work with acute insight born of hard work, and in a most professional manner. Members of the legal profession are not naturally familiar with the scientific methodology of an “Anthropologist of Law” who teaches at a medical school, thus her scholarship gives to all of us rural judges and legal practitioners something beyond our own anecdotal experiences. She constructs a rock-solid foundational groundwork for unveiling the emergent blossoming of a restorative rural justice unfettered by the dictates of time-worn urban-centric models of how the legal system and the legal profession should work.

Here's the abstract for the Statz article, On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland, published recently in the Law and Society Review: 

Rural state and tribal court judges in the upper US Midwest offer an embodied alternative to prevailing understandings of “access to justice.” Owing to the high density of social acquaintanceship, coupled with the rise in unrepresented litigants and the impossibility of most proposed state access to justice initiatives, what ultimately makes a rural courtroom accessible to parties without counsel is the judge. I draw on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork and an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to illuminate the lived consequences and global implications of judges' responses, which can be read as grassroots‐level creativity, as resistance, or simply as “getting by.”

The entirety of the judge's commentary--and, of course, Prof. Statz's article--are worth reading in their entirety.