Scholarship on the rural attorney shortage is numerous and interdisciplinary—from documentation of the low lawyer numbers in every county and state to sociological and economic takes on the issue. The articles covered in The Practice barely skim the surface. To dive further into the topic, take a look at some of the important research that have been published in the past few years.
In 2024’s “The Rural Lawyer Shortage as (Surprising) Scholarly Impetus,” Lisa Pruitt traces an outpouring of scholarship on the rural lawyers to about 2014, just after South Dakota launched the Rural Lawyer Recruitment Program and held a symposium to celebrate. That year, Pruitt and Bradley Showman wrote the article “Law Stretched Thin: Access to Justice in Rural America,” where they argue that access to justice in rural areas requires more than seeding the field with more lawyers—it requires “thick” access to justice, one that addresses not just the surface difficulties of rural legal practice but also the underlying causes that make rural life challenging. Pruitt’s recent 2024 piece on the “surprising scholarly impetus” helps contextualize the broad range of scholarship that has come out since that landmark symposium and article. Importantly, Pruitt writes: “That 2014 issue of the South Dakota Law Review thus helped build new bridges across disciplines. It helped tear down the silos (rural pun intended) that often artificially and unhelpfully separate scholars who should be in conversation with one another.” Indeed, the interdisciplinary conversation around the rural lawyer shortage and access to justice in rural spaces has led to interesting valences on the topic, something that only further justifies Pruitt and Showman’s call for a “thick” understanding of rural legal practice.
Pruitt collaborated with Hannah Haksgaard, Danielle Conway, Michele Statz, Lauren Sudeall, and Amanda Kool for “Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice” in 2018. This multistate exploration has become an important contribution to the legal desert compendium, offering data across six different states on the different challenges faced by different jurisdictions. The piece is critical for making a dent in what was up until then a dearth of data on the state of rural access to justice in the United States—something many were aware of, but few had numbers to point to.
In “One Crisis or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access to Justice and the Rural Attorney Shortage,” Daria Fisher Page and Brian Farrell point out that legal deserts and access to justice are often conflated but are not the same—and it is worth disentangling these intersecting but distinct challenges. More lawyers, Fisher Page and Farrell say, does not necessarily mean people can access such lawyers. They write:
While it is reasonable to believe there is some relationship between the presence of attorneys and access to justice,perhaps these two factors do not perfectly correspond. In the rural context, this discourse would benefit by recognizing that what we often see as one crisis is, in fact, two related but distinct problems: (1) There is a declinein rural attorneys, a real phenomenon with real implications for communities and the profession, which may have some degree of impact on access to justice; and (2) In rural communities, there is a legitimate access to justice concern for which the decline in attorneys might be a cause, and an increase in attorneys might be one of severalpotential interventions.
Michele Statz, Hon. Robert Friday, and Jon Bredeson’s “‘They Had Access, But They Didn’t Get Justice’: Why Prevailing Access to Justice Initiatives Fail Rural Americans” looks at the state of interventions, drawing from empirical data collected from North Minnesota and Wisconsin. Why do proposed solutions for rural legal access often fall short? When solutions come from urban areas, they ignore the lived realities of rural communities. Many initiatives that seek to expand access to justice, the coauthors say, end up as “barriers” to justice. “To be rurally relevant, A2J initiatives must honor and draw on these acute, expert understandings of local need and existing collaborative relationships,” they write.
Many of these scholars, such as lead author Hannah Haksgaard and Lisa Pruitt (see “Confronting the Challenges of Rural Justice”), have been writing about this issue for years. Pruitt’s “Legal Deserts and Spatial Injustice: A Study of Criminal Legal Systems in Rural Washington,” coauthored with sociologists Jennifer Schwartz and Jennifer Sherman, documents the spillover effects when there are not enough attorneys available to provide indigent defense, relying on data from the state of Washington. Likewise, Haksgaard’s articles—“Rural Practice as Public Interest Work,” “Court-Appointment Compensation and Rural Access to Justice,” and “Indian Country Lawyers: A South Dakota Survey”—offer other important angles on the subject.
For those interested in the topic, the University of South Dakota Law Review, which devotes a special issue to the subject annually, is a good place to start. For frequent updates on the subject, also visit Pruitt’s blog, Legal Ruralism.
