Rural Law Short Course: A Mini-Series in Infographics
In this original essay, Emily A. Prifogle, a legal historian and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, first discusses curricular innovations on rural law happening at several U.S. law schools and then introduces a series of related infographics to be featured on the Rural Review over the next two weeks. These infographics were produced by students in Professor Prifogle’s own mini-seminar on Law in Rural America at Michigan Law.
By Emily A. Prifogle (Michigan Law).
A small but growing number of law schools now offer courses on rural legal issues. For example, there is Ann Eisenberg’s Law and the Urban/Rural Divide course, Lisa Pruitt’s Law and Rural Livelihoods seminar, Jessica Shoemaker’s Rural Lands course, and Amanda Kool’s Legal Practice and Access to Justice in Rural America reading group. I teach my own version at Michigan Law, a seminar called Law in Rural America.
The course surveys a broad range of legal subfields and exposes students to historical and contemporary legal problems specific to rural communities in the United States. Using academic articles and journalism, we cover topics such as rural legal aid, American Indian law, farmworkers rights, education policy, land use, and even criminal prosecution. I encourage students to understand changing legal definitions of the rural, consider how the topics are intertwined, and rethink the place of rural communities in American law and policy.
One of the course assignments is to write a JOTWELL review article. From a pedagogical perspective, I like the assignment. It helps students understand an article’s main argument and engage in scholarly conversation in a positive way. When I taught the seminar in 2020, three students ultimately published their JOTWELL reviews online: Katherine Klein reviewed Maybell Romero’s Viewing Access to Justice for Rural Mainers of Color Through a Prosecution Lens; Jackson Erpenbach reviewed Ann Eisenberg’s Rural Blight; and Aiden Park reviewed Hannah Haksgaard’s Rural Practice as Public Interest Work.
This past semester I sought to recreate this course in short form, teaching a mini-seminar version, Law in Rural America: Cows, Courts, and Country Lawyers. Michigan Law’s mini-seminars are 1-credit courses held over six sessions, each over dinner at the professor’s home, with ten students. For my mini-seminar, we covered some foundational readings during the first session, and then I gave the students the option of selecting any four topics from my full-length seminar that they wanted to cover over the course of the semester. They chose rural health, environment, the rural vote, and rural economies. We read some classics, like Lisa Pruitt’s Rural Rhetoric, Jessica Shoemaker’s Fee Simple Failures, and Ann Eisenberg’s Economic Regulation and Rural America. I added a few new readings this time too, like Laura Bray’s Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Justice and Rick Su’s Democracy in Rural America. Each session was full of lively and thoughtful discussion that engaged with both the readings and our own lived experiences.
Seeking to create a meaningful assignment appropriate for a 1-credit course, I asked my students to create infographics about any subject on rural law that interested them. My aim was to have them produce something that was both interesting to them and potentially useful to others—the audience could be academics, lawyers, rural residents, or some other public audience.
My students delivered. During our last session, students presented their infographics to our small group. Their presentations covered rural brain drain, CAFOs, food insecurity in Indian country, rural maternal health and reproductive rights, queer life in rural spaces, the opioid crisis, local governance, and rural access to parks. I learned so much from my students’ insights, and now I’m delighted that you might too.
The Rural Review will highlight infographics from Robert Brewer, Mitchell Forbes, Taylor Hopkins, Ian Klopfenstein, and Ryan Sharpstene. Robert Brewer knows a lot about environmental law issues and produced a great infographic on access to parks in rural communities as well as the shared challenges to park access both rural and urban communities experience. Mitchel Forbes, from whom I learned so much about rural Alaskan governance, created an infographic with instructions for how to dissolve rural municipal governments in Alaska. Taylor Hopkins has a stunner of an infographic packed with information about food insecurity in Indian Country. Ian Klopfenstein’s infographic is about the invisible, yet visible realities of queer life in rural spaces with some alarming data on anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation in rural states. Last, but not least, is an infographic about the rural brain drain from Ryan Sharpstene, someone who has experienced the movement away from a rural hometown for his education and career. I hope you enjoy learning from these as much as I did!
Follow along with the miniseries here. We will update as we post new infographics. Here is what is available now:
