Legal Deserts
The Practice
August/September 2025
Access to legal representation in rural areas has become increasingly difficult. How are states, legal aid organizations, and the profession accounting for this real loss?
August/September 2025
Introducing the August 2025 Issue
Across the United States and around the world, rural areas have suffered from brain drain. The result is not just towns without lawyers, but also towns without doctors, accountants, teachers, and more.
Incentivizing Rural Practice
Ten years after South Dakota first launched its Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, Hannah Haksgaard reviews the data. In this excerpt from her 2025 book, The Rural Lawyer: How to Incentivize Rural Law Practice and Help Small Communities Thrive (Cambridge University Press 2025), Haksgaard documents what it took for South Dakota to really invest—and whether or not the program can be called a success in the fight against legal deserts.
Mapping Legal Deserts
Three researchers map legal deserts in the United States, showcasing why documenting legal access remains challenging. Why build such a complex portrait of intersecting need? It helps policymakers figure out where dollars should go.
Tribal Lay Advocates Expand Access to Justice
Indigenous peoples in the United States on reservations allow non-lawyers—Tribal lay advocates—to provide legal services in many civil cases, a vital service in areas where there are often not enough lawyers both geographically and barred in Tribal courts. Could such community-centered justice initiatives be a model for other states interested in licensing non-lawyers?
Tracing the Threads of Rural Legal Scholarship
Scholarship on the rural attorney shortage is numerous. We provide a glance at the rich work being done around achieving meaningful rural access to justice, starting with some of the important work to come out of the South Dakota Law Review.
Confronting Antirural Bias
Legal educators should do more to "chip away at what has become an antirural bias by holding out success stories and showing students what it looks like to forge your own path in a rural community," says Lisa Pruitt, an influential scholar of rural studies and the law at UC Davis.
