On the distinction between the rural lawyer shortage and the rural ATJ crisis

Daria Fisher Page and Brian Farrell of the University of Iowa wrote recently in Law 360 under the headline, "Behind The Unique Hurdles Of Rural Access To Justice."  Here's the gist of their argument, which is a shorter version of their recently published article in the Washington Law Review.  

We argue, however, that rural access to justice challenges and the rural attorney decline have become conflated and viewed as a single crisis in which the declining number of attorneys is understood to be the cause of the rural access to justice problem, and recruiting new attorneys is therefore the preferred solution.

Moreover, these conclusions have often been reached in the absence of agreed-upon definitions of "rural" or "access to justice." We view the rural attorney shortage and rural access to justice as distinct but related phenomena.

Much of the entanglement comes from the fact that access to justice has often been, quite simplistically, measured by reference to attorneys per capita or attorneys per county.

This usage reflects both a narrow understanding of what access to justice means and the fact that, unlike other potential metrics, data on licensed attorneys has been cheaply and readily available from regulating authorities.

The romantic view of the accessible, though generalist, Main Street lawyer may persist. But research shows a growing gap between the needs of low-income rural clients and available private legal services in rural communities.

An attorney is a poor measure of access to justice if their skills and expertise don't match the needs of the community or their services aren't affordable.

Increasingly, access to justice scholars and policymakers have recognized that access to justice is not synonymous with access to lawyers.

Instead, the focus has been to better understand the likelihood individuals in a given location will encounter justice problems and their actual legal needs when they do. An inquiry into rural access to justice focused on people's needs, the outcomes they're looking for and how they want to be treated will allow for the implementation of interventions that best match these needs.