Statz: How to Address Rural Access to Justice
In The Scandal of Particularity: A New Approach to Rural Attorney Shortages and Access to Justice, author Michele Statz (Minnesota Medical School/Law) explores difficulties in fully understanding rural attorney shortages, including the wider impacts on rural communities, through interviews with people involved in the justice systems of multiple rural and tribal communities.
The article emphasizes how community members perceive the impact of rural attorney shortages on their communities. Conventionally, policy approaches to rural attorney shortages focus on initiatives incentivizing law students and attorneys to serve rural areas as well as providing resources to increase access to justice in rural spaces. Here, Statz approaches the problem instead by emphasizing the “felt understanding of the particularities of a place,” focusing on the shared experiences and understandings of the unique obstacles to accessing justice in rural communities, including those presented by lack of access to tools such as reliable internet and mail service.
Statz uses a mixed-methodology approach focusing primarily on interviews conducted with more than 350 community members directly involved with or interested in the local justice system, as well as courtroom observations and household surveys. In providing excerpts from these interviews, Statz identifies shared values of rural communities and residents’ desires to be represented by legal advocates who share their local experiences, such as understanding the particular difficulties presented by living in rural places or being from the same tribal community. Ultimately, Statz emphasizes the long-term relationships between those going through the legal system who are often experiencing personal crises and legal advocates who likely know the individuals and care for them as fellow community members.
Overall, the article emphasizes how this sense of shared experience and connection to the community can inform the development of sustainable solutions to the rural justice gap. These solutions, according to Statz, need to reflect local values and residents’ deep sense of community. Statz encourages further research surrounding rural attorney initiatives that originate within and respond to the specificity of the spaces being represented in order to promote solutions that are “relevant, relational, and sustaining” within the communities being served.
This article connects to prior work by Statz on these important themes (e.g., here and here). Readers are also recommended to this reflection from one of the rural judges who previously served as an informant for some of Statz’s research.
