Commentaries

Why do so many rural residents oppose land and resource use projects, such as energy development?

One commonality in each of these conflicts is the type of resource at issue – land and natural resources – which, because they are accessible to large groups of people and “vulnerable to depletion,” require collective management. This commentary explores literature surrounding rural resentment, particularly as it relates to land and natural resources management. Against this backdrop, I suggest that the one legal means of engaging in collective management, “public interest” tests, exacerbate this rural resentment even where designed to meet legitimate ends.

‍By Erika Allen Wolters (Oregon State University) and ‍Kevin Pirch (Eastern Washington University).‍‍ ‍

As the United States expanded its territory into the American West, the federal government’s distributive land policies helped promote settlement by incentivizing new residents with the promise of land, resources, and profit. While these policies, like the Homestead Act, helped entice settlers (and simultaneously displace Indigenous peoples), large-scale infrastructure projects such as the expansion of railways aided western settlement. However, the federal government retained a significant amount as public land, allocating it based on the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). The PLSS neatly mapped the region into 640-acre sections, resulting in a checkerboard pattern of public and private land ownership. This intermix of land ownership led to expected quarrels over natural resource use, ownership, and private property rights. Additionally, it also left about 9.52 million acres of the 640 million acres of public land total in the United States inaccessible for public use (TCRP). ‍

By Cassie Chambers Armstrong (Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law)

I began my career as a legal aid attorney representing low-income survivors of violence in rural Kentucky. This experience led me to try to understand the impact of place on domestic violence protective orders. Specifically, I am interested in the unique challenges that rural courts face and how these barriers impact those trying to navigate these legal processes.

Many people have studied eviction, and rightly so: Eviction in America is at a crisis level, with an estimated 2.7 million households facing eviction filings each year. Eviction has an impact on people and communities, with research linking it to job loss, poor physical and mental health outcomes, and all-cause mortality. Eviction can disrupt every aspect of a person’s life.

If you pay attention to public discourse about rural populations, you might have noticed something missing in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election: think-pieces on rural voters. These think-pieces—musing on rural voters’ motivations, their seemingly disproportionate susceptibility to Donald Trump’s appeal, and their role in deciding the most recent election—were everywhere after the 2016 presidential election that led to Trump’s first term. Even in 2020, after Joe Biden’s victory and evidence of more complexity in rural voting patterns, analysts and pundits seemed eager to assess the role of the rural vote. Yet, rural voters just don’t seem to be top of mind for this round of post-election analysis. Why might that be?

The electricity industry in the United States is undergoing a period of massive and turbulent transition. One recurring question is whether public regulation or public ownership can best serve public interest goals. Nearly every state has an agency with intensive regulatory powers to direct or influence the activities of electric utilities. However, even with state regulatory oversight, private utilities have faced persistent criticism, and public ownership of utilities is often touted as a potentially desirable alternative. In this debate about public ownership versus public control, Nebraska offers an interesting and underexamined case-study.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) made headlines in early 2024 as many major American museums closed exhibits and entire wings in order to comply with new regulations governing the possession and display of Native American cultural artifacts and funerary objects. But the recent regulatory changes have the potential to affect more than museum displays—they may give reservation residents a stronger say in what the government does on their land.

Third in our series of infographics produced in Emily Prifogle's Law in Rural America seminar is a closer look into food insecurity in Indian Country by third-year law student at Michigan Law, Taylor Hopkins

Second in our series of infographics produced in Emily Prifogle's Law in Rural America seminar is by Alaska native and recent graduate of Michigan Law, Mitchel Forbes, with thoughts on "over-goverance" in rural Alaska and tips for dissolving local municipal governments:

First in our series of infographics produced in Emily Prifogle's Law in Rural America seminar: an insightful look at how access to parks and public greenspaces varies across the urban/rural spectrum by Robert Brewer, a third-year law student at Michigan Law.

In this original essay, Emily A. Prifogle, a legal historian and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, first discusses curricular innovations happening at several U.S. law schools on rural law and then introduces a series of related infographics to be featured on the Rural Review this week.