Access to Justice among the Rural Poor in Minnesota and Wisconsin

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Title: Access to Justice Among the Rural PoorIndividuals who are poor often do not have access to legal services. Civil legal aid provides some legal services to poor individuals, but usually not enough to meet their legal needs. As well, these individuals may not seek access to justice because may not be aware that their disputes are legal in nature, or because they are not aware they may have access to legal help. This project engages in an ethnographic study of the rural poor in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, as it seeks to examine this population's conceptions of access to justice, and to understand why these individuals usually do not pursue legal services. By engaging in a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches on rural poverty, this project addresses theoretical issues on legal mobilization from the perspective of law and society as well as socio-legal studies of legal advocacy and legal mobilization. The project will explore the complex intersections of poverty, advocacy, and policy in the distinct context of the rural poor in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Methodological approaches include observation, archival and legal analyses, and interviews. This sustained, multi-sited and diverse methodological approach will provide a rigorous and comparative consideration of rural access to justice.