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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students
Primary Theme: Identity and Equity
Secondary Theme: The Political
This panel critically evaluates the “persistent injustice” (Wandler 2015) experienced across diverse rural communities in the U.S. More specifically, it considers the jurisdictional contexts and jurisprudential differences that both complicate and mitigate this injustice, and that likewise shape rural individuals’ conceptualizations of, access to, and expectations for state and/or tribal courts.
As scholars have documented, the “rural lawscape” (Pruitt 2014) tends to be marked by geographic isolation; precarious employment; widely dispersed or nonexistent social service providers; a dearth of public transportation; a lack of anonymity; and what are often powefully pervasive gendered and moral discourses around work, fairness, and self-sufficiency. This panel highlights how rural community members—perhaps most notably Native Americans, im/migrants, youth, and the elderly, disabled, and veterans—are vulnerable to or because of such factors, as well as how these “ordinary people” themselves produce and powerfully influence legal systems of practice and signification (Silbey 2005).
This panel also considers how the socioeconomic and spatial contours of rurality impact the practice and efficacy of law, with particular attention to rural attorney shortages, diminished state and federal funding, and insufficient or absent attention to rural practice and/or Indian law in law school training. It also explores the documented urbanormativity (Fulkerson and Thomas 2013) of scholars, judges, and legislators whose presumptions and resource allocations fail to recognize the complexity and vulnerability of state and tribal courts or the uneasy connections and divergences between these courts’ jurisdictions and practices.
To that end, panelists explore how and when rural community members mobilize or neglect the law; jurisprudential differences across rural courts; the experiences of rural pro se litigants; court capacity; the role of legal process in re/defining rights and community; intersections of rural place, law and identity, including class, gender, race, tribal membership, and/or citizenship; the arguable agility of tribal courts—and perhaps of rural courts more broadly (see Nesper 2015); the role and influence of tribal, state and federal governments in rural communities; and methodological insights into meaningfully eliciting rural expertise and experiences.
This panel will offer a rigorous and comparative consideration of rural access to justice in context. It will necessarily complicate popular and policy assumptions of rural America, and it will engage and grow the relatively limited empirical scholarship on rurality and law.
Michele Statz
Assistant Professor
University of Minnesota Medical School
Michele Statz
Assistant Professor
University of Minnesota Medical School
Michele Statz
Assistant Professor
University of Minnesota Medical School
Larry Nesper
University of Wisconsin Madison
Frederick Howard
The New School
Christopher Chavis
Program and Social Media Coordinator
Alliance for Lawyers and Rural America
Melissa Tatum
Chair, American Indian Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Program
University of Arizona
Barbara Creel
Weihofen Professor of Law
University of New Mexico School of Law
Christine Zuni Cruz
UNM School of Law