‘Placing’ the other: final year law students’ ‘imagined’ experience of rural and regional practice within the law school context

Mundy, Trish

doi:10.5130/ijrlp.i2.2012.2669

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…It also contributes to “advice deserts,” or local social services networks that are too widely dispersed to be utilized (Newman 2016), and a dearth of public transportation and bad roads owing to poorly funded local governments (Cross and Leering 2011). Other structural factors include a decreased supply of rural legal services owing to retiring local practitioners (Cooperstein 2014), perceptions of rural practice among new JDs as not lucrative and too isolated (Runge and Vachon 2014), and insufficient or absent attention to rural and/or tribal practice in law school training (Mundy 2012). There is also the documented urbanormativity (Fulkerson and Thomas 2013) of state and federal policymakers whose assessments, priorities, and resource allocations fail to recognize rural sociospatial vulnerability (Bredeson and Statz 2019; Pruitt 2006; Statz 2018).…”

Section: A Rural/global Sociolegal Intervention In “Access To Justice”mentioning

confidence: 99%

On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland

Statz

2021

Law Soc Rev

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Rural state and tribal court judges in the upper US Midwest offer an embodied alternative to prevailing understandings of "access to justice." Owing to the high density of social acquaintanceship, coupled with the rise in unrepresented litigants and the impossibility of most proposed state access to justice initiatives, what ultimately makes a rural courtroom accessible to parties without counsel is the judge. I draw on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork and an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to illuminate the lived consequences and global implications of judges' responses, which can be read as grassroots-level creativity, as resistance, or simply as "getting by." "Of the people in court today, I know every single one of them… I had two calls at home last night about 'your case tomorrow.'" The judge shook his head and looked around his chambers. "On my very first day on the bench, a guy in the back of the courtroom stood up, shouted my first name, and said, 'How the fuck are ya?'" My jaw dropped. "No." He nodded, laughing. It had been a three-hour drive north, through long stretches of national forest and into the county seat. It was a northern paper-mill town that smelled like it, tiny houses lining the shady streets and the mill spouting steam up ahead. Between 2013 and 2017, the average per capita income here was $23,000, with 25% My heartfelt thanks to the editors, anonymous reviewers, and Larry Nesper for their insightful and enthusiastic feedback on this manuscript. This article also benefitted greatly from collegial and expert engagement at the 2020 Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop and the University of Minnesota Law School's Faculty Works in Progress forum. I am grateful for these stimulating conversations. Special thanks to Riaz Tejani and Robin West for discussing the paper and offering such compelling and even moving critiques. My thanks as well to Jon Bredeson for his indispensable research assistance. And finally, I am humbled by the profound generosity of the judges whose work I detail here. To be so welcomed by very different-and very busy-individuals is something I could never anticipate. I hope this manuscript helps shed light on their important commitments. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation's Law and Sciences Program (award #1729117).

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Section: A Rural/global Sociolegal Intervention In “Access To Justice”mentioning

confidence: 99%

On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland

Statz

2021

Law Soc Rev

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“Bush Law 101”: Realising Place Conscious Pedagogy in the Law Curriculum

Kennedy¹,

Mundy²,

Nielsen³

2016

JUTLP

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In 2012, a team of academics from six universities worked on an OLT-funded project, ‘Rethinking Law Curriculum: developing strategies to prepare law graduates for practice in rural and regional Australia’. The project was motivated by the declining proportion of lawyers being attracted to and remaining in practice in rural and regional Australia. The main outcome of the project was an open education resource designed to sensitise students to the realities of the rural and regional legal practice context in the form of a customisable curriculum package that can be embedded as components within existing units of study, or developed as a stand-alone unit. Three of the team members have now implemented the curriculum package within their law school programs, two in the form of a stand-alone elective unit delivered to undergraduate law students, and the third to support placement programs for law and paralegal students. Applying the process of peer observation and collaborative reflection, this paper reports on their experiences to offer insights on how to adapt and integrate the ‘Rethinking law’ package within the law school curriculum. In particular, this paper will discuss the significance of place-consciousness as a pedagogical tool, and the capacity of the ‘Rethinking Law’ package to encourage law students to ‘re-imagine’ careers in rural and regional Australia and their role as the country’s future lawyers.

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‘Placing’ the other: final year law students’ ‘imagined’ experience of rural and regional practice within the law school context

Cited by 2 publications

References 1 publication

On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland

On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland

“Bush Law 101”: Realising Place Conscious Pedagogy in the Law Curriculum

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