Introduction
This project examines the spatial, socioeconomic, and political context of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, locally referred to as “the Northland.” It considers how rural and remote socio-spatiality impacts low-income individuals’ conceptualizations of and efforts to mobilize law. It also explores the unique challenges of lawyering and judging across diverse communities and state and professional frameworks.
As interdisciplinary and longitudinal research, we use mixed methods (one-on-one interviews, focus groups, individual and household surveys and geospatial mapping). Since 2017, we have documented a spatially-specific and multi-dimensional understanding of justice—what it means, if it’s expected, and how it’s administered in rural and remote spaces.
Accordingly, this study enhances and complicates public knowledge about rural America. It also contributes a rural perspective to socio-legal studies of the legal profession, in/equity, and mobilization. And finally, it challenges emergent conversations on “justice gaps” by illuminating the ways in which “access to justice” must necessarily involve access to quality education, employment, childcare, food, healthcare and mental health services, broadband, and good roads. [See “The Rural A2J Guide.”]
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