Pruitt et al.: Legal Deserts

The Harvard Law & Policy Review published an important symposium issue on Revitalizing Rural America in 2018. The first article in the issue, Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice, is particularly noteworthy for its comparative perspective on rural access-to-justice issues, and responses, across different regions of the United States.

In Legal Deserts, Lisa R. Pruitt (UC-Davis, Law), Amanda L. Kool (independent), Lauren Sudeall (Georgia State, Law), Michele Statz (Minnesota Medical School, Duluth, Anthropology of Law), Danielle M. Conway (Maine, Law - now Dickenson Law), and Hannah Haksgaard (South Dakota, Law) come together to address lack of access to justice in rural America. In particular, they examine six geographically, demographically, economically, and politically varied states — California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Relying on a diverse set of sources including local media and in-person interviews, each author examines the challenges faced and the solutions enacted in one of the six states surveyed.

Although each state is different, and pure state-to-state comparisons are difficult because of those differences, these surveys do identify difficulties prevalent across all the six states, including rural attorney shortages and underfunded legal aid.

Legal Deserts proposes improving rural justice by continuing to study the legal needs and resources in rural areas and then building more innovative solutions grounded in data to match legal services with rural needs. Legal Deserts also scrutinizes the role legal educators and law schools can play in bridging the rural-urban justice gap.