Rural lawyer shortage continues to attract attention

This post can be chalked up to the shameless self promotion department, but this post is to celebrate that "Legal Deserts:  A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice" (2018) has been downloaded 1000 times.  It's been my most downloaded article--though it's a relatively recent one--for some time.  And to be clear, it's not just "my" article; I wrote it with Amanda Kool, Michele Statz, Danielle Conway, Lauren Sudeall, and Hannah Haksgaard. 

As you can see from the screenshot of my ssrn.com page, my other most "popular" articles are some of my earliest rural scholarship (from 2007 and 2008), about gender.  One commonality among these three articles is that I (and my colleagues) were writing to existing communities of scholars, in the first instance access-to-justice scholars/scholars of the legal profession and, in the second, feminist legal scholars. 

I've always thought that downloads and citation counts are silly metrics for scholarly success, but they are metrics that nevertheless increasingly dominate the legal academy.  In that sense, I guess, law and rural livelihoods has made a breakthrough as evidenced by these 1000 downloads. Paying attention to the rural lawyer shortage is a huge part of that success.  I didn't anticipate that when I accepted the invitation of the South Dakota Law Review to participate in their 2013 symposium (thank you Kelsea Kenzy Sutton, symposium editor), but that event, which sent me down this path of investigating the rural lawyer shortage, has made a big difference.