Statz: It Is Here We Are Loved
In “It Is Here We Are Loved”: Rural Place Attachment in Active Judging and Access to Justice, author Michele Statz (Anthropology of Law, Minnesota Medical School) examines how shared place attachments and active judging are critical components of conversations and scholarship surrounding the rural justice gap. In her ethnographic work, Statz focuses on how judges create a shared experience of rurality and how this provides a meaningful form of “access” for rural unrepresented parties in court.
When discussing the court system and legal needs of rural places, most research and activism focuses on the “lack of access” and gaps in services that rural communities face. In contrast, this research focuses on a uniquely positive phenomenon Statz’s research has identified in the rural legal space – place attachment and active judging.
Active judging occurs when a judge steps away from a traditional, passive role to assist those without counsel. This looks different for many judges and litigants; however, this article focuses on roughly seven judges presiding in tribal and state courts in “the rural Northland,” an area of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. These judges all participate in active judging, and Statz argues the judges are largely motivated by the rural spaces they are embedded within and their attachments to this place.
This article’s findings suggest that it is rural place - and, specifically, a shared experience of rural place - that largely animates and informs active judging in the courts Statz observes. The article walks the reader through different examples of active judging in the rural Northland and demonstrates how the judges’ place attachments influenced their approaches to non-represented rural litigants. Statz combines this phenomenon with the concept of love, arguing that doing so necessarily situates active judging within a richer context of landscape and relationship. Rural judges observe and experience the consequences of legal deserts, absent health and social services, long distances, and depressed local economies. The result is active judging that is informed by a keen sensitivity to litigants’ lives and broader contexts as well as by judges’ own “multigenerational and multijurisdictional” experiences.
In the courtroom context, “place” is a mutual understanding of a regional landscape, sacred site, landmark, or practice that may elicit affect or emotion and proves an invitation; it is an attempt to level a courtroom encounter that in rural areas is often further complicated for both court and party by the marked absence of counsel. For Statz, these connections and understandings forge trust - whether it is trust in the judge, trust in the judicial system, or both. This trust, Statz maintains, is central to judges’ efforts as they step away from a traditional passive role to assist someone without counsel.
This article provides meaningful insight into emergent literature on active judging and demonstrates how some rural judges’ efforts are deeply informed and driven by place. It begins a necessary conversation on a systematic, place-based intervention in prevailing scholarship on active judging and access to justice.
[Side Note from RRP: For interested readers, we cannot get enough of this commentary we published in the Rural Review last May from the Hon. David E. Ackerson, one of the judges Statz observed and interviewed in prior, related research. Highly recommend as an accompaniment to this new piece.]
