Rural ATJ (Part II): Daedalus special issue on "Access to Justice" neglects rural

Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recently published its Winter 2019 issue, which happens to be on the topic, "Access to Justice."  Lincoln Caplan and Rebecca Sandefur (who recently was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant and interviewed for the New York Times here) are guest editors.  As a lawyer who attends to poverty and access to justice, I was and am excited by the special issue.  My enthusiasm was dashed, however, when I saw how little attention the sub-issue of rural ATJ was accorded by the special issue.  In short, across 24 short pieces (including Introduction and Coda), the word "rural" was used in only six of the contributions.  Of those, one was simply a reference to the Rural Summer Legal Corps program in LSC President James Sandman's contribution, and three were references to California Rural Legal Assistance, a legal aid organization that angered President Ronald Reagan, leading him to seek devastating funding cuts to the Legal Services Corporation.  For example, Lincoln Caplan, in The Invisible Justice Problem, writes of early opposition to the Legal Services Corporation:

The favorite punching bag was California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a network of offices in rural parts of the state set up to represent migrant farm workers against agribusiness, to which the program gave a million-dollar grant (about $7.5 million today). Ronald Reagan, as California’s governor, vehemently opposed the network and the legal counsel it provided. 

Robert W. Gordon and Luz Herrera also refer to California Rural Legal Assistance in their contributions, Gordon's a historical perspective on access to justice and Hererra's on Community Lawyering.

Apart from references to a program and an organization with "rural" in their name, the only two uses of the word rural were in Karen Lash's piece titled Executive Branch Support for Civil Legal Aid. Lash writes of the various roles for government, specifically state government, including the need to respond to rural residents' needs:

Federal government objectives, like getting Americans working and keeping children in school, also animate policy discussions at the state level. Governors call for increased commitment to greater effectiveness amid severe fiscal challenges.  They talk about what effective government should do: increase opportunities for job-seekers; increase ac- cess to health care; attack the opioid crisis; expand housing and aid to homeless people; improve foster care; give second chances to people leaving the criminal justice system; help disaster recovery; prevent violent crime; ensure services for children, seniors, and homeless veterans; and address the needs of rural residents.

Subsequently, Lash circles back to talk about how statewide models of Legal Aid Funding may better serve rural areas, writing:

The statewide models show great promise to raise the overall standard of care through joint provider trainings, data-sharing to better identify statewide patterns and trends, greater collaboration among legal-aid providers, and perhaps most important, extending legal aid to rural areas and communities where it has not been available due to fragmented and limited legal-aid funding.

On the other hand, mentions of"urban" and "city" are far more plentiful in this special issue, including in articles by Elizabeth Chambliss (Marketing Legal Assistance), Luz Herrera (Community Law Practice), Gillian Hadfield (More Markets, More Justice), Tonya Brito (The Right to Civil Counsel, referencing New York City), D. James Greiner (The New Legal Empiricism & Its Application to Access-to-Justice Inquiries, who also refers to distance); Sameer Ashar & Annie Lai (Access to Power); Robert W. Gordon (Lawyers, the Legal Profession & Access to Justice in the United States: A Brief History), and Margaret Hagan (Participatory Design for Innovation in Access to Justice). Rebecca Sandefur, in her contribution, Access to What? uses the word "urban" only in the title of an article she cites; ditto Colleen F. Shanahan & Anna E. Carpenter (Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality), who cite to the Urban Institute.

This neglect of rural in this special issue is disappointing; the collection is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) urbannormative. Countering that orientation of the Daedalus issue, I am glad to say that my co-authored piece on rural ATJ, Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice is now out in the Harvard Law and Policy Review's special issue on "Revitalizing Rural." The article is available for free download here, and the citation is 13 Harvard Law and Policy Review 15 (2019).

I will also add that the flip side of this Daedalus issue on access to justice overlooking rural is a recent special issue of the Boston Review, Left Elsewhere, about rural America, which appears to overlook the role of law and legal institutions.