Rural Legal Scholarship: Michele Statz on "The Scandal of Particularity"

 Here's the link to Statz's latest article, and the abstract follows.  The title is "The Scandal of Particularlity: A New Approach to Rural Attorney Shortages and Access to Justice," and it is forthcoming in the South Dakota Law Review:   

This article adds necessary dimension to prevailing understandings of the rural attorney shortage and proposed solutions to it. These solutions include efforts to recruit and retain rural attorneys; to advance “non-lawyer” practitioners; and to create distance-spanning rural access to justice technologies. While many of these initiatives are based in careful, empirical analysis and have strong evaluative components, they often start with an answer: More attorneys. UPL Waivers. Legal help apps. Legal empowerment. This makes sense, particularly when we consider that many of the individuals at the forefront of addressing the rural access to justice crisis are themselves law scholars or legal professionals who feel real, understandable urgency toward finding a solution. What happens, however, when we approach rural attorney shortages not with a proposed initiative, but with more, and different, questions? Instead of a solution-centric or even person-centered approach, what if we sought to understand the subjective, relational experience of legal problems in rural places? How might honoring the lived reality of rural community members who are and who are not legal professionals unsettle what we believe about professional hierarchies, expertise, and who is best suited to address attorney shortages?

Drawing on over seven years of mixed-methodological, collaborative research in diverse rural settings, this article proposes a new epistemological approach to rural access to justice and professional shortages. It provides empirically based principles for students, scholars, and practitioners to consider as they explore rural justice gaps and efforts to address them. It demonstrates that a deep, considered acknowledgement of crisis, trust, home, care, time, and relationships—in short, the embodied particularities of rural place and how they feel—offers a kind of knowledge that necessarily exceeds familiar metrics and indicators of “success.” Finally, this framework ensures that practices and policies aimed at solving rural attorney shortages are relevant, collaborative, and sustaining.