2024 Law & Rurality Workshop Summary
On November 15th, we convened for the 2024 Law & Rurality Workshop in person at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa). A joint project facilitated by the Rural Reconciliation Project at the University of Nebraska College of Law (Professor Jessica Shoemaker) and the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law (Professor Hannah Haksgaard), we were fortunate to have the University of Iowa College of Law (Professors Brian Farrell and Daria Fisher Page) as our local host and sponsor this year.
Held in the landmark Iowa Old Capitol Building, the workshop provided a forum for scholars to share research related to the law and rurality theme through discussions of in-progress drafts or in sessions devoted to incubating, through more open-ended discussion, still-emerging future research ideas and projects. Sessions also featured interdisciplinary members of the University of Iowa faculty who acted as discussants on each draft, highlighting resonant aspects of the works and facilitating workshop discussion.
Participants convened from Canada, England, and the United States, and included representatives of a wide range of disciplines, including law, sociology, anthropology., planning, and history. The workshopped papers and project ideas reflected this diversity of perspectives and backgrounds, ranging from climate and renewable energy policy to access to justice and education, and from rural healthcare to questions of land and property.
The public version of the schedule is available here. A list of workshop participants and papers follows.
A Legal Vulnerability Index to Guide Access to Justice Interventions - Brian Farrell, Daria Fisher Page & Ryan Sakoda (Iowa)
A Fairer Approach to Renewable Energy Permitting: Asking Not-just-Rural Communities to Do Their Fair Share - Sarah Banas Mills (Michigan)
Rural Medicaid - Jessica Millwad (Idaho)
Mere Creatures of the State?: The Environmental Movement and Civil Liberties in the U.S. - Caleb Pennington (Iowa)
Rural Judges and Institutional Loss: Honoring Burnout and Unresolved Grief - Michele Statz (Minnesota)
Rural Mass Incarceration and the Politics of Punitiveness - Greg Brazeal (South Dakota)
Using Saskatchewan to Make an Equation: Finding the Integers of Rural Anger So that Modern Colonialism is Better Recognized - Signa Daum Shanks (Ottawa)
How the Rural Lawyer Shortage and Spatial Inequality are Undermining the Criminal legal System in Washington State - Lisa Pruitt (UC-Davis)
A Marketable Education: Bondholder Supremacy and the Death of Higher Education - Priya Baskaran (American University Washington College of Law)
Regulating the Forever Wild - Ted W. De Barbieri (Albany)
Financializing Farmland - Jessica Shoemaker (Nebraska)
Rural Law Judges in Criminal Adjudication - Maybell Romero (Tulane)
Negotiating Sensory Rural Landscapes Through Lawmaking: A French Case Study - Max Zahnd (Warwick)
Settled: From Feeding to Fueling the Nation - Debbie Becher (Barnard College)
The Local Turn in Federal Climate Policy: Assessing Challenges in Getting Funds to Disadvantaged, Rural, and Low-Capacity Communities - Gabe Pacyniak (New Mexico)
What is the Role of Law Schools in Solving the Rural Criminal Justice Crisis? - Malia Brink and Blane Skiles (SMU)
The workshop was a terrific opportunity to engage with fellow scholars from diverse areas of expertise. Participants walked away with insightful feedback on their drafts, nuanced perspectives on rural issues, and a fun memento of the experience – temporary tattoos featuring the Law & Rurality Workshop logo! Special thanks to Professors Brian Farrell and Daria Fisher Page for hosting this impactful event.
The 2025 Law & Rurality Workshop will be virtual. Please watch for next year’s Call for Papers. The next in-person workshop will be held in Fall 2026 with a new, yet-to-be-determined host.
Information about past workshops can be accessed here (2023), here (2022), and here (2021). Archived details for the Fall 2024 workshop are available here.
