In this issue, we dive into legal deserts—often rural areas where there are not enough lawyers or legal representatives to provide services. Across the United States and around the world, rural areas have suffered from brain drain, with young people leaving rural spaces to seek education or opportunity in urban areas and never returning. The result is not just towns without lawyers, but also towns without doctors, accountants, teachers, and more. Many state bar associations have begun contending with this by offering alternative solutions, like allowing licensed paralegals to provide legal advice or creating incubators designed to draw law students to rural areas. In our lead story, “Incentivizing Rural Practice,” Hannah Haksgaard, professor of law at the University of South Dakota, reviews data from 10 years of the South Dakota Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, a first-of-its-kind program that offers lawyers a stipend (just over $12,000 annually) to move to and practice in rural communities for five years. For this story, we excerpt Haksgaard’s recent book, The Rural Lawyer (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Was the program a success? Haksgaard says yes. She says:
At the 10-year anniversary of the program…, 75 percent of the lawyers who started the program were still in rural practice. In a world where young adults change jobs frequently, I view 75 percent retention as a success. Several rural communities in South Dakota went from having no lawyers to having one in town. Other rural communities were able to replace a retiring lawyer. This type of program is not fast. Only a few new lawyers will enter the program each year, but every lawyer who makes a career in the rural practice of law means the program is worth having.
In a series of supporting stories, we explore what work is being done to map rural lawyers as well as solutions that focus on access to justice and legal representation more broadly. In “Mapping Legal Deserts,” we talk to three researchers about what data and methods they use to understand where lawyers are located, what lawyers are practicing in different areas, and why mapping “deserts” remains a challenge. Mapping lawyers is helpful for policymakers to zero in on where funding should be distributed and how, all three researchers agree. However, the issue is larger than just legal deserts, as K. Aleks Schaefer, associate professor of international markets, trade, and policy at Oklahoma State University, says. “Because when we think about rural America on a bigger scale, this brain drain has now played out over multiple generations,” Schaefer says.
In “Tribal Lay Advocates Expand Access to Justice,” we discuss two programs that help prepare laypersons to serve as legal representatives on Tribal lands. Indigenous populations in the United States have long certified non-lawyers to work in Tribal courts. More recently, programs have sprung up to help prepare individuals to take the Tribal bar exams. We look at the Montana Tribal Advocacy Incubator Project, run by the Montana Legal Services Association, and the National Tribal Trial College, a partnership between the University of Wisconsin and the Southwest Center for Law and Policy. Erica Shelby, a Tribal lay advocate on Blackfeet Nation, thinks of her role helping clients in civil proceedings, mostly family law, as “healing.” She says: “I think all courts are flawed, but I think that they’re also healing. When we’re able to get results, we’re helping change the reservation, heal the reservation, one case at a time.”
In our “Confronting Antirural Bias,” Lisa Pruitt, the Brigitte Bodenheimer Research Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Law at the UC Davis School of Law, speaks with David B. Wilkins, faculty director for the HLS Center on the Legal Profession, about what has evolved in the time she’s been studying rural lawyers. Pruitt addresses the real divides that separate the rural and the urban, and calls for renewed attention to how the two are interconnected. “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,’” she says. She continues:
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?
Finally, because there is such a wealth of scholarship devoted to rural lawyers and legal deserts, much of it written by Pruitt, “Tracing the Threads of Rural Legal Scholarship” surveys recent academic research on the topic and offers a variety of ways to engage more fully.
