Access to justice is a theoretical construct and applied principle within the US legal system, centering equity in access to legal services and representation. However, access to justice extends beyond the legal sphere and into the daily lives of vulnerable people. This article contributes to long-standing efforts to reimagine and repurpose the access to justice framework through an ethnographic examination of rural domestic violence. In doing so, there exists significant promise to transform access to justice in a way that comprehensively sees and addresses inequity and injustice. Access to justice can be used in a multitude of ways to make sense of vulnerability at the intersection of rurality, domestic violence, resource accessibility, and activism, expanding the theoretical framework beyond its original scope toward social justice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.