Shaun Jamison of Purdue Global Law School writes (excerpting just a little here, but don't miss the full column):
It won’t come as news to lawyers living and working in rural areas, but many of the people who live there are challenged by a lack of access to solutions to their legal needs. The access to justice issues have grown so acute in many places that a relatively new term of art—“legal deserts”—has grown up in legal aid circles to describe them. This article will offer a brief discussion of some of the key issues as well as possible solutions.
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There are several reasons for the low ratio of rural lawyers, including a misperception that a lawyer cannot make a living in a rural area, the “graying” of the rural bar, and a paucity of new lawyers coming in to serve rural areas. Some will argue that more lawyers are not the solution, or at least not the only solution, but there still is a minimum number of lawyers needed to ensure the protection of people’s constitutional rights and ensure the functioning of the court system. A criminal case, for example, requires three lawyers in a county to be available—and free of conflicts in the matter at hand—to try a case: a judge, a prosecutor, and a defense lawyer.
Here's a (nearly) one-stop shop on legal deserts and related aceess to justice issues. And Jamison refers to Hannah Haksgaard's new book, The Rural Lawyer (Cambridge University Press 2025), an important new resource.
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