The field of rural law is a growing subfield.
More law schools are offering courses on rural legal issues. But you don't have to think of yourself as a rural legal scholar to find this field applicable to your own teaching and research.
Below is an online version of my Law in Rural America seminar. The materials assembled below are not exhaustive, and I welcome your suggestions for additional materials.
Course Description
This course is for those curious about the place of “the rural” in American law and politics. Perhaps you’ve noticed the buzz and backlash surrounding books like JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Maybe you’ve read about the opioid epidemic in rural communities or are interested in voting access for rural Native people. This course will push you to think seriously about how law shapes rural communities and how rural geography in turn shapes legal and policy implementation.
The course will survey a broad range of legal subfields and expose you to historical and contemporary legal problems specific to rural communities in the United States by using legal, political, and historical sources. We will cover topics such as rural legal aid, American Indian law, farmworkers rights, education policy, land use, and even criminal prosecution. In the process we’ll consider changing legal definitions of the rural, consider how each of the topics covered are intertwined, and rethink the place of rural communities in American law and policy.
Example Assignments
JOTWELL Review
JOTWELL is the Journal of Things We Like (Lots), and it provides a platform for legal scholars to celebrate good scholarship. They publish 500-1000 word reviews of recently written articles and books. Your review should explain the value of the work being reviewed, explain the main argument(s), and get the reader excited to read the article. The focus should not be on critique or criticism, even though you should still take a critical eye to the work. Read the author guidelines for “Writing the ‘Jot’” here: https://jotwell.com/style-guide/. For an example of a Jot on a piece of rural legal scholarship, read Melissa Murray’s review of Luke Boso’s Urban Bias, Rural Sexual Minorities, and the Courts here: https://family.jotwell.com/same-sex-and-the-city/
Three students from Winter 2020 ultimately published reviews with JOTWELL.
Katherine Klein, Whitewashing the Rural: How Cultural Views Influence Access to the Justice System for Communities of Color, JOTWELL (February 21, 2020) (reviewing Maybell Romero, Viewing Access to Justice for Rural Mainers of Color Through a Prosecution Lens, 71 Me. L. Rev. 227 (2019)), https://equality.jotwell.com/whitewashing-the-rural-how-cultural-views-influence-access-to-the-justice-system-for-communities-of-color/.
Jackson Erpenbach, A Practitioner’s Guide to Addressing Rural Blight, JOTWELL (April 23, 2020) (reviewing Ann M. Eisenberg, Rural Blight, 13 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 187 (2018)), https://property.jotwell.com/a-practitioners-guide-to-addressing-rural-blight/.
Aiden Park, Reframing Rural Private Practice Work, JOTWELL (August 7, 2020) (reviewing Hannah Haksgaard, Rural Practice as Public Interest Work, 71 Maine L. Rev. 209 (2019)), https://legalpro.jotwell.com/reframing-rural-private-practice-work/.
Infographic
Your assignment in this mini-seminar is to create a one-page infographic and present it during our closing session. The presentation may be no longer than 5 minutes. You may pick any topic related to rural law that you wish, including those we discuss in class, although you are not limited to those topics. An infographic is a visual representation of information, quickly communicating key data to the reader. Like other academic scholarship, it communicates a central argument, contributes to our knowledge base, and is accurately cited.
Several students from the Winter 2023 Mini-Seminar published their infographics on the Rural Reconciliation Project’s Rural Review.
Reading List
Introduction
Week 1: What is Rural?
Lecture: A History of Defining the Rural
Flora, Flora, and Gasteyer’s Rural Communities (5th Edition), pp 5-25-109-23.
Lisa Pruitt, Rural Rhetoric, 39 Conn. L. Rev. 159 (2006), pp. 177-84
Ratcliffe, et. al., Defining Rural at the U.S. Census Bureau, United States Census Bureau, (December 2016), pp. 1-8.
Rural America LPE Blog Symposium
Jessica Shoemaker, Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes and Race 119 Mich. L. Rev. 1695 (2021).
Part I. Rural Suffering & Bias
Week 2: Bias as Cause of Rural Suffering
Lecture: Rural School Consolidation
Debra Lyn Bassett, Ruralism, 88 Iowa L. Rev. 273 (2003), pp. 273-342 (Read pp 273-292).
Flora, et al, Rural Communities, pp. 129-140.
Ann Eisenberg, Economic Regulation and Rural America, 98 Wash. U. L. Rev. 737 (2021)
Week 3: Rural Experiences & Urban Bias: Gender & Sexuality
Flora, et al, Rural Communities, pp. 71-83, 102-104.
Lisa Pruitt, Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural, 2 Utah L. Rev. 421 (2007), pp. 421-488.
Luke Boso, Urban Bias, Rural Sexual Minorities, and the Courts 60 UCLA L Rev 562 (2013)
Week 4: Rural Communities & the Environment—Water
Flora, et al, Rural Communities, pp. 37-56.
Lisa Pruitt and Linda Sobczynski, Protecting people, protecting places: What environmental litigation conceals and reveals about rurality, 47 J. Rural Studies 326 (2016), pp. 326-336.
Ann M. Eisenberg & Elizabeth Kronk Warner, The Precipice of Justice: Equity, Energy, and the Environment in Indian Country and Rural Communities, 42 Energy L.J. 281 (2021).
Caitlin A. Lewis, Texas Colonias: Injustice by Definition, 5 Envtl. & Earth L.J. 163 (2015), pp. 163-189.
Laura A. Bray, Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Injustice: Water Inequality on the Navajo Nation, Rural Sociology 86(3), 2021, pp. 586–610
Part II. Rural Agriculture
Week 5: Rural Agriculture
Katherine Porter, Going Broke the Hard Way: The Economics of Rural Failure, 2005 Wis. L. Rev. 969 (2005), pp. 969-1032 (skim).
Ashwood, L., A. Imlay, L. Kuehn, A. Franco, and D. Diamond. Forthcoming. Empty Fields, Empty Promises: A State-by-State Guide to Understanding and Transforming the Right to Farm. The University of North Carolina Press. [selections TBD]
Ashwood, L., D. Diamond, and F. Walker. 2019. “Property Rights and Rural Justice: A Study of U.S. Right-to-Farm Laws.” Journal of Rural Studies 67: 120-129.
Art Cullen’s Pulitzer Prize winning editorials on Iowa corporate agriculture: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/art-cullen
Week 6: Agrarian Myth
Lecture: Michigan Migrant Ministry
Ross Singer, et al, Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America (2020), Introduction (3-36).
Alexis Guild and Iris Figueroa, The Neighbors Who Feed Us: Farmworkers and Government Policy—Challenges and Solutions, 13 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 157 (2018), pp. 157-186.
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability (2019), Introduction, Chapter 2, and skim Chapter 4 (pp. 1-28; 29-52; 103-134).
Week 7: Black Farmers
Thomas Mitchell, Destabilizing the Normalization of Rural Black Land Loss: A Critical Role for Legal Empiricism, Wisconsin L. Rev. 557 (2005), pp. 557-615.
Conor Bailey, et al, Heirs Property, Critical Race Theory, and Reparations, Rural Sociology (2022).
Thomas Mitchell, et al, How the Government Helped White Americans Steal Black Farmland, New Republic (2022). https://newrepublic.com/article/166276/black-farm-land-lost-20th-century-billions
Debbie Weingarten, How a Black Farming Community Found Justice, Civil Eats, August 16, 2019. https://civileats.com/2019/08/16/how-a-black-farming-community-found-justice/
Pigford CRS Report: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RS20430.html
Part III. Rural Governance & Justice
Week 8: Rural Courts
Maybell Romero, Viewing Access to Justice for Rural Mainers of Color Through a Prosecution Lens, 71 Maine L. Rev. 2 (2019), pp. 2-17.
David M. Engel, The Oven Bird’s Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community, 18 Law & Society Rev. 551 (1984), pp. 551-582.
Statz, Michele. 2022. “‘It is here we are loved’: Rural Place Attachment in Active Judging and Access to Justice.” Law & Social Inquiry. 1-31.
Statz, Michele. 2021. “On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland.” Law & Society Review 58(1): 5-37.
Week 9: Rural Legal Aid and Access to Justice
Lecture: The Country Lawyer
Daria Fisher Page and Brian R. Farrell, One Crisis or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access to Justice and the Rural Attorney Shortage [Forthcoming Washington Law Review]
Lisa Pruitt and Bradley Showman, Law Stretched Thin: Access to Justice in Rural America, 59 S.D. Law Rev. 466 (2014), pp. 466-528 (skim).
Hannah Haksgaard, Rural Practice as Public Interest Work, 71 Maine L. Rev. 210 (2019), pp. 210-226.
Week 10: Rural Local Government
Lecture: The First Rural Zoning Ordinances
Flora, et al, Rural Communities, pp. 401-24
Lane W. Lancaster, Government in Rural America (2nd edition, 1952). Chapter 1, pp. 1-23.
Michelle W. Anderson, Sprawl's Shepherd: The Rural County, 99 California Law Review 365 (2012).
Ann Eisenberg, Power and Powerlessness in Local Government: A Response to Professor Swan 135 Harv. L. Rev. F. 173 (2022).
Week 11: The Rural Vote
Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Rule of One-Person, One-Vote,” in §10.8.3 of Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies Third Edition, pp. 882-886.
Debra Lyn Bassett, The Politics of the Rural Vote, 35 Ariz. St. L.J. 743 (2003), pp. 743-791.
Rick Su, Democracy in Rural America, 98 N.C. L. Rev. 837 (2020).
Eric Lotke and Peter Wagner, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004), pp. 587-607.
Developments in the Law, Securing Indian Voting Rights, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1731 (2016), pp. 1731-1754.
Melotte, Lack of Access to Infrastructure Hurts Voter Participation in Rural America, Daily Yonder (2023)
Part IV. Rethinking Rural Justice
Week 12: Rethinking Economic Justice in Rural America
Lecture: Native Relocation
Michelle Wilde Anderson, The Fight to Save the Town: Reimagining Discarded America (2022), Introduction, Chapter 2, Conclusion (pp. 1-34; 83-130; 235-48)
Ann Eisenberg, Distributive Justice and Rural America, 61 B.C. L. Rev. 189 (2020)
Week 13: Rethinking the Place of Rural America in Modern Law & Politics
Final Class Presentations