When I first read this article on the rural lawscape, my gut reaction was defensive. I learned that rural areas have fewer courts, longer police response times, and less access to legal services than urban areas. The obvious solution would be to invest more money in these areas so that they have real access to justice. But then came my instinctive urban response: who is going to fund this? The taxes from urban spaces? Why should cities subsidize rural services?
I sat with that reaction for a while. It felt spiteful, and after some time, I realized it was the wrong question.
The zero-sum framing
That article, “The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space,” talks about the “mutual constitutivity” of law and rural space. Rural areas have less law because their material characteristics (low population density, distance, sparse built environment) make legal infrastructure expensive to maintain. That sparse legal presence then shapes rural culture, fostering self-reliance and skepticism toward the state.
Photo Credit: Jay Walljasper (2019)
The policy implication seems obvious: if rural residents want more legal infrastructure, they need more funding. And state funding is finite, and largely comes from the taxes of wage-earners in the city. So rural gains mean urban losses, right?
This framing positions rural and urban communities as competitors. It shows up in fights over federal appropriations, in resentment about which communities receive disaster relief, and in arguments about whether “real America” deserves more than coastal cities.
Prior posts on this blog have explored related dynamics. One post on California redistricting quoted a rural rice and walnut farmer: “People in the cities don’t have a clue what it takes to survive out here. I don’t think people that were born and raised in the cities can represent us to the same extent.” This frames the issue as the big-city bureaucrats thinking they know better than the rural folk with their actual lived experiences.
Another post on the Secure Rural Schools Act documented how a rural school superintendent made fourteen trips to Washington over three years to secure funding that Congress acknowledged had bipartisan support but still allowed to lapse. The funding was described as “budget dust” relative to federal spending. If rural needs are so uncontroversial and so cheap, why did it take three years and fourteen flights?
The actual budget
To help me put all this in perspective, I considered the scale of American federal spending. The FY2025 defense budget request was $849.8 billion. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had access to $28.7 billion in 2025. Customs and Border Protection’s budget was more than $19 billion for that year.
Meanwhile, the Legal Services Corporation asked for only $1.797 billion in 2025, while facing the threat of a proposed 46% budget cut. The LSC provides federal funding for civil legal aid to low-income Americans in both rural and urban areas.
Photo Credit: Mina Corpuz (2026)
The access-to-justice gap that the rural lawscape article documents is not expensive to address relative to other federal priorities. The entire LSC budget is less than 0.2% of defense spending. Meaningful investment in rural legal infrastructure, or urban legal infrastructure, would cost a rounding error on military appropriations.
This pattern holds across federal spending. In FY2023, 62% of the federal discretionary budget went to militarized programs: war, weapons, law enforcement, incarceration, detention, and deportation. Less than $2 out of every $5 in federal discretionary spending went to education, housing, childcare, disaster relief, environmental protection, or scientific research. Since 2001, the federal government has added $2 to the discretionary budget for militarism for every $1 added to invest in communities.
Meanwhile, wealth inequality has reached historic levels. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle. By 2022, they had 71 times the wealth. The incomes of rural men have stagnated for 50 years, while the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 229% between 1979 and 2019. Rural and urban working people have both lost ground to the same forces.
The federal government has the money to fund rural communities. It simply chooses to fund violence in place of investment. The scarcity that pits rural against urban is not a fact of nature. It is a policy choice.
The shared problem
Both rural and urban poor face access-to-justice gaps. Rural residents drive hours to reach a courthouse. Urban residents wait months for overburdened public defenders. The material conditions differ, but the underlying problem is the same: inadequate funding for legal infrastructure serving ordinary people. There is some federal recognition of the specific problems that rural Americans face. The Violence Against Women Act identifies domestic violence in rural areas as a focus for discretionary spending. The Crime Control Act sets aside funds specifically for rural drug enforcement.
But legislative recognition of rural disadvantage does not guarantee meaningful investment. A post on the rural health fund on this blog noted that the $50 billion rural health fund in the recent reconciliation bill came alongside $137 billion in projected Medicaid cuts to rural areas over ten years. The gesture toward rural needs accompanied a policy that undermines them.
The political function of the divide
When rural and urban residents see each other as competitors for limited resources, they do not build coalitions around shared interests in healthcare, legal access, housing, or economic security. The “why should my taxes go there” instinct, which I initially felt, plays into a framework where ordinary people fight over crumbs, instead of coming together to improve their material conditions.
Photo Credit: Jacob Migdall (2015)
A post challenging the Ezra Klein Show’s framing of rural-urban tension pointed out that rural voters alone lack the numbers to determine national elections. Blaming a “rural coalition” for federal policy obscures the urban voters who supported the same candidates and the structural factors that shape resource allocation. The framing is, as the post puts it, “inflammatory and therefore unhelpful. Of course, it is also inaccurate.”
Rural-urban resentment prevents coalition-building. When a rancher in Modoc County and an unhoused person in Sacramento see each other as competitors rather than people with shared interests in functional public services, neither builds power.
What is the baseline?
I believe everyone in the United States should have access to a viable, just legal system regardless of where they live. That belief does not require me to think rural and urban interests are identical. It requires me to think they are not fundamentally opposed.
The money exists. The obstacle is political priority. Rural-urban competition is a distraction from the actual allocation choices being made.
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