Legal Deserts
An interview with Prof. Lisa Pruitt
CLE Credit — Approved in 4 States
Restricted Access to Justice
Rural America is facing a shortage of lawyers. In over 50 counties in the U.S., there are no lawyers serving residents, requiring clients to travel hours across counties to find a lawyer who can represent them. Without access to a competent lawyer, they face potentially dire consequences in employment, housing, health, and criminal matters. In part 1 of this 2-part series, Professor Lisa Pruitt of UC Davis explains what accounts for the lack of lawyers in rural communities, how the lawyer shortage confounds access to justice, and the COVID-19 pandemic’s acute effects on rural legal deserts. She explores the unique ethical issues caused by the rural lawyer shortage, including conflicts of interest, due process concerns with courts presided over by non-lawyers, and other related professional responsibility issues.
Watch Part 2 of Legal Deserts.
About Prof. Lisa Pruitt
“If you don’t have a lawyer or two ... in a place, then when there are systemic injustices occurring in that place, you don’t have a system of checks and balances.”
Lisa Pruitt is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. She teaches torts, law and rural livelihoods, sociology of the legal profession, among other courses. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked abroad for almost a decade in settings ranging from international organizations to private practice. She worked with lawyers in more than 30 countries, negotiating cultural conflicts in various arenas, from intellectual property rights to rape as a war crime. Pruitt’s scholarly work focuses on rural places, examining the rural-urban difference in relation to how people engage law and state. She has looked at how rural areas are affected by abortion access, substance abuse, termination of parental rights, domestic violence, access to justice, health and human services, and indigent defense. She has authored countless journal articles published in Harvard Law and Policy Review, Journal of Rural Studies, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, UC Davis Law Review, among many others. Pruitt served on the California Commission on Access to Justice and the Rural Access Committee from 2015 to 2019 where she also served as chair from 2017 to 2020.
