David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession, spoke with Lisa Pruitt, who has been writing about the intersection of rurality and the law for nearly two decades.
David B. Wilkins: I’m so thrilled to be talking to you, Lisa. We have repeatedly observed—in culture, politics, life—that the urban–rural divide is becoming more significant. What motivated you to begin studying the rural lawyer shortage, and how has the issue evolved in that time?
Lisa Pruitt: My original interest was in teasing out the legal relevance of rurality. Why should legal scholars be thinking about rural-urban difference, broadly speaking? I’d written about a range of issues where rural-urban difference seemed significant but was little discussed, from domestic violence to land use to substance abuse. Then in 2013, I got a call from a woman at the South Dakota Law Review, and they were putting together a symposium to commemorate Project Rural Practice, which eventually became the South Dakota Rural Attorney Recruitment Program. I thought, well, this is a lovely invitation. I’d love to go to Vermillion, South Dakota, to participate in this. It was a good decision because I met bar leaders from a number of states who were aware they had a looming rural lawyer shortage and were trying to figure out what to do. I was very inspired by what South Dakota was beginning to do—and what they have since done.
At that time, people in South Dakota were thinking about the rural attorney shortage differently—not in the classic access-to-justice way, but with a pragmatic view more attuned to economics, including the economics of local government. The chief justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court said at the time, “If you don’t have any doctors, you’re not going to have a hospital for long. And if you don’t have any lawyers, your courthouse isn’t going to function.”
The people in South Dakota were also drawing attention to all the multifaceted roles that lawyers play in communities. Lawyers are folks who serve on the school board and in these various other institutional capacities because they bring a useful type of knowledge that is often missing in rural communities. Getting more lawyers into rural places means that county governments have to expend fewer resources, such as paying lawyers “windscreen time”—meaning fees to drive in from far away to provide indigent defense or advise local governments.
Why should legal scholars be thinking about rural-urban difference, broadly speaking?
Lisa Pruitt, Brigitte Bodenheimer Research Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law.
When I started writing about this in 2014, people would say, “Well, why do rural people need lawyers?” My response: Well, they may not be doing mergers and acquisitions, but they need help with divorce and child custody. They need help with a range of criminal issues. There’s trusts and estates. They basically need lawyers to advise them on almost everything that urban and suburban people do. Local governments need lawyers. And then there are issues like environmental injustice—maybe there’s a polluting industrial farm. Who are the locals going to turn to? Are they even going to know that they have a legal claim if no lawyers are around to brainstorm a problem like that?
Today, scholars like Hannah Haksgaard at the University of South Dakota (see LEAD) and Elizabeth Chambliss at the University of South Carolina are exploring these issues in their own ways. Hannah is asking: How do these lawyers actually balance the budget? How do they establish a client base—keep the lights on, so to speak? Elizabeth is asking: Who are the lawyers who are willing to go into these rural communities? What is their motivation? Similar to Hannah, she’s asking about the economics of small-town practice. It’s all information we need to know if we are going to figure out how to support these attorneys and bolster their viability.
Wilkins: After 10 years of writing about legal deserts and rural attorneys, what do you see as the most pressing problems today? What’s gotten better and what are the big issues still on the table for rural lawyers and for rural communities?
Pruitt: Rural lawyers and rural communities are definitely related. Let me say right off the bat that not many lawyers are going to want to go and live in a community that doesn’t have good schools and doesn’t have decent health care. Baby lawyers coming out of law school are thinking about where they want to live out their professional lives, but also their personal lives. Do they already have a life partner? Will that life partner be able to find employment? All of those considerations are inherently linked to the vibrancy of rural communities.
I think the more that rural America as a whole struggles, the greater the challenge will be to get lawyers into rural communities. I don’t know many places where the situation has gotten better in the last 10 years, except maybe South Dakota, where the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program has been a success by a lot of measures. They’ve gotten the baby lawyers to go into these communities. They found mentoring for those lawyers. Many of those lawyers have chosen to stay. They are meeting many of the needs of these local communities.
South Dakota got started early. They were very serious about it. They devoted what we could argue is an appropriate amount of funding. North Dakota is now doing the same thing. I find that a lot of states spend a lot of cycles talking about the problem, but there’s a real reluctance to put the money where the mouth is.
The more that rural America as a whole struggles, the greater the challenge will be to get lawyers into rural communities.
Pruitt
In some ways this is understandable because it’s a gamble. We don’t know that things are going to work like they do in South Dakota. In a place like South Dakota, politicians still care more about their rural reaches. It’s very hard to get traction around rural issues in a place like California, where I live, because rural populations are such a small slice of a massive state. I’m not saying that what South Dakota has done is going to work—or to be affordable—everywhere.
One of my frustrations is that law schools have done too little. We get so caught up in the prestige game, and rural areas are sadly lacking in prestige. I don’t think legal educators have been willing to rebut that presumption and promote rural practice and educate students who are prepared for it.
Wilkins: What should law schools be doing?
Pruitt: There’s a number of practical things. For instance, if a law school has its own loan repayment assistance program, it should include rural practice, even if it’s private practice, as a type of public interest work. Stanford, for instance, characterizes rural practice in that category so that students pursuing that work can qualify for more generous loan repayment assistance.
I also think that the attitudes that we convey mean a lot. The former chief justice of South Dakota used to show up every autumn to talk to USD’s first-year class and say that rural practice can be as fulfilling as any other type of practice.
There are also curricular interventions that law schools could undertake. South Dakota has talked about having a one-stop-shop class to equip students to go hang out a shingle. My law school from time to time teaches a practical course in how to run a small-firm practice. These sorts of classes would make sure students had some practical skills around divorce and child custody, wills and estates, maybe some land use, real estate, and other bread-and-butter tasks that are likely to come in the door.
The former chief justice of South Dakota used to show up every autumn to talk to USD’s first-year class and say that rural practice can be as fulfilling as any other type of practice.
Pruitt
One recent innovation in the United States is the distance learning program. We don’t really know yet how those are going to play out. But what they permit is people who want to become lawyers to stay in their rural community to study law. They can do the bulk of their work online, and then they presumptively will wind up staying in that community.
Wilkins: Let’s talk about the role of technology. I’m sure people are wondering whether technology can assist rural lawyers in being able to expand their resources or provide do-it-yourself services. How are you seeing the role of technology in providing rural access?
Pruitt: A lot of folks I talk to who are looking for a cheap and cheerful solution turn very quickly to technology. I certainly don’t want to be a naysayer, but I think it has its limits. First of all, we don’t even have really top-notch broadband coverage in rural areas. In addition, there will be many folks who just don’t have the skills to engage on digital platforms. We should be realistic about that.
During the pandemic, a lot of court appearances moved online. That provided a natural opportunity to see how this works. In several states now, some judges won’t allow remote appearances anymore. Others love doing as many remote appearances as possible. This means you’ve got this patchwork of methods—I don’t love the inconsistency. It feels almost certainly unfair—at the least, it is uneven.
There’s a very talented anthropologist of law, Michele Statz, who observes a loss of institutional wholeness when using this format. Having a mixture of hybrid and in person is the worst of all, she says, where you’ve got some people present in person and others Zooming in. There’s some exciting scholarship that’s being done on these issues that will hopefully help inform policymakers to decide what to do about technology, what limitations they put on it, where they make investments, and where they say it’s just not good enough.
Wilkins: That relates to something that you’ve kind of been weaving through, and that is the tendency to conflate providing lawyers with access to justice. Could you say a little bit about that?
Pruitt: When I first went to South Dakota, I was thinking about the presence of lawyers as an access-to-justice issue—but it’s obviously so much more. Consider work that Daria Fisher Page and Brian Farrell at the University of Iowa have done thinking through these issues. I will also point to, for example, Elizabeth Chambliss’s recent work in South Carolina. She says we’re all focused on supply side—getting more lawyers into these communities. But that’s not going to solve all the problems because those lawyers are not necessarily going to have the time or the motivation to provide low bono and pro bono work to many of the most vulnerable people in those communities. That is one of the places where we have to talk about getting other legal resources into communities.
I think legal educators can 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.
Pruitt
Wilkins: My guess is having spent so much time thinking about this issue, it’s easy to see the problems—and to imagine the problems. And for young lawyers, those things can be scary. But I wonder, Why should my students and any lawyer want to think about going to a rural community to build their practice and career?
Pruitt: I’m biased because I grew up in a rural place. I sometimes joke that I’m a dual citizen. But I think there are reasons for all of us to care about rural America.
Especially in this current political moment, there are impulses to engage in what I call rural bashing and say, “Oh, these are horrible people. They’re so retrograde and ignorant, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” And yet the rural and the urban are inextricably linked. Urban people are very reliant on rural resources. It’s not just why lawyers should care and be willing to go, but why we should all think more charitably about rural communities and our interdependence on them. What would happen if our rural communities dried up and blew away?
We’ve recently been hearing a lot more about the loss of rural hospitals, and there’s bad news on the horizon for rural post offices and other services being downgraded. It’s very easy to say, “To each his own; we’ve got ours.” I don’t think that’s a very constructive attitude because urban communities are interdependent on rural communities for what rural sociologists refer to as food, fuel, and fiber.
Rural life is not for everyone. Absolutely not. But there are a lot of people who love rural living. They love that sense of community, of being known.
Some people crave anonymity. Some people want to be part of a community. They want to be a big fish in a small pond. They want their kids to be in a more intimate educational setting. They want their kids to grow up on a farm. There are all sorts of impulses that can animate the decision to live in a rural place. I think legal educators can 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.
Wilkins: That’s so important because right now the only thing they see are lawyers on TV or the big law firms that come to recruit. There are more ways to be a lawyer and more ways to receive satisfaction of the kind that you’re talking about in other parts of the country. Thank you for shedding light on this important question.
Lisa Pruitt is Brigitte Bodenheimer Research Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Law at the UC Davis School of Law.
David B. Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession.
