Study: many legal-aid programs don't work in rural areas because they're designed for cities

"Many legal-aid programs don’t work in rural areas because they are designed to serve large cities, a new research study says. The result is that low-income rural residents aren’t getting equal access to justice, according to a new paper published in the paper in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy," Olivia Weeks reports for The Daily Yonder.

The report, based on case studies in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, found that such programs fail the rural poor in three ways: they don't account for the lack of broadband access, they incorrectly presume that anyone in crisis can competently serve as their own attorney, and their standards for justice don't line up with rural Americans' expectations, Weeks reports.

Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin have high poverty rates, low employment, an economy mostly reliant on mining, and "an absence of large legal firms, limited social services, and rural lawyer shortages that are accelerated by a graying pool of local attorneys. 'Legal deserts' like this one significantly reduce the efficacy of state and federal legal aid funding. Even if the cash support is there, the practitioners aren’t around to take advantage of it," Weeks reports. "In rural areas, only 14 percent of civil litigants receive legal assistance. The other 86% are left to defend themselves in court. This rate of civil representation is less than half the national average." The authors say defendants in rural Wisconsin can wait as long as four months for a public defender. 

The authors write that lawmakers' access-to-justice solutions are often inaccessible to rural defendants: "Most simply, the initiatives touted as advancing 'equal administration of justice for all' often prove to be the very same self-help forms, helplines, and online resources that low-income rural residents identify as barriers to justice." 

Lack of broadband access, lower tech literacy, and too little legal guidance also make a just legal result less likely for the rural poor, they write: "Without addressing the rural digital divide, the ability of technology to close rural civil justice gaps remains limited."