Rural communities in the United States lag behind their urban counterparts with respect to most measures of well-being and quality of life, including access to health care, 1 education, 2 and digital technology infrastructure. 3 Another significant rural deficit-until recently, overlookedis access to legal services. Rural America suffers a painful shortage of lawyers, a deficit that has grown more acute in recent years. Further, current institutional responses-most in states dominated by urban populaces and urban-centric policymakers-provide little hope for reversing this trend.This chapter surveys the short history of policymakers' and scholars' attention to the rural lawyer shortage in the United States, discussing this phenomenon as a key aspect of a burgeoning rural access-to-justice (A2J) crisis. A number of initiatives to narrow the rural-urban justice gap are currently afoot in the United States, including the expanded use of paralegals and various interventions based on artificial intelligence and other technologies. These, however, are beyond the scope of this chapter, which focuses on the rural attorney shortage. We categorize policy responses to that problem into several overlapping strands: (1) programs that provide financial incentives and other supports for lawyers to practice in rural locales; (2) programs that channel urban attorney resources to rural areas; and (3) programs focused on cultivating and expanding the pipeline to rural practice. Where possible, we provide status reports on initiatives in an effort to document and publicize their progress, thereby informing future policymaking. Finally, we discuss briefly the medium-to long-terms impacts that changes driven by the COVID-19 pandemic may have on the legal profession and delivery of legal services in rural America.* * * Even under the miserly definition of the U.S. Census Bureau (population clusters smaller than 2500 or living in open territory), about 14% of the U.S. population-some 46 million residentslive in rural areas. 4 This is a mismatch for the 2% of small law practices operating there. 5 The 1
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