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“It Is Here We Are Loved”: Rural Place Attachment in Active Judging and Access to Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2022

Michele Statz Open the ORCID record for Michele Statz [Opens in a new window]
Michele Statz*
Affiliation:
Anthropologist of Law and Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth, MN, United States [email protected]
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Abstract

In the United States, rural economic marginalization and corresponding gaps in employment, affordable housing, health care, nutrition, and education put individuals at high risk for legal need. Yet many rural regions are “legal deserts” with few, if any, attorneys, and prevailing access-to-justice initiatives tend to neglect the unique challenges posed by rurality. The efforts of rural tribal and state court judges, though often overlooked in scholarship and policy, offer a compelling response to this inequitable access-to-justice context. Building on emergent work on “active judging,” or when judges step away from a traditional passive role to assist unrepresented parties, this manuscript explores how rural place and place attachments shape diverse judges’ interactions with litigants. It draws on mixed-methodological research across seven tribal and state courts in the upper Midwest to shed light on rural judges’ efforts, how these efforts are regarded by unrepresented parties, and to what extent a shared experience of rurality provides a meaningful form of “access.” In so doing, it offers a novel spatial intervention in scholarship on access to justice and active judging and contributes to more rurally relevant justice practices.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 247 - 277
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

My deepest thanks to the judges and court personnel who so graciously collaborated on, and helped facilitate, this research; to the litigants who entrusted me with their time and expertise; and to the American Bar Foundation and JPB Foundation for generously funding this project. For their suggestions and support, I am grateful to Alyse Bertenthal, Justice Deno Himonas, Justin Richland, Rebecca Sandefur, and the Law & Rurality Workshop community. I also wish to thank Owen Jackson, Jacob Smith, and Brieanna Watters for their endlessly thoughtful insights, good humor, and committed work as research assistants. This study received Institutional Review Board’s approval from the University of Minnesota Institutional Review Board (no. 1703S09601).

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