In Taxation, Redistribution, and the Urban-Rural Divide, author Kirk J. Stark (UCLA School of Law) considers how population density in urban and rural areas influences subnational and nation tax policies in the United States. The author claims that the urban-rural divide promotes more redistributive tax policies at the subnational level, while pushing the national government towards less redistributive tax policies. 

In Community Lawyering in Coal Country: Empowering Those Who Power America, Gregory Robertson (West Virginia Law) examines how social institutions have failed coal miners by systematically discouraging attorneys and advocates from representing coal miners in Black Lung benefits claims, and how four attorneys have modeled success despite these challenges by drawing on the principles and strategies of community lawyering.

A periodic collection of recent research, analysis, and other notable rural items.

In Preserving Rural School Districts from the Threat of Vouchers and Charters, Preston C. Green III (Urban Education and Educational Leadership and Law, University of Connecticut), Bruce D. Backer (Teaching and Learning, University of Miami), Christopher M. Saldana and Julie F. Mead (both Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison) discuss how voucher and charter school programs are having an unintended negative impact on rural school districts and communities. The authors suggest that state legislatures take action to fulfill their constitutional obligation to ensure public access to education by creating “education preserves.”

In Empowering the Energy Transition in Rural Electric Cooperatives, Katrina Smith (Carolina Law), outlines the shortcomings of rural electric cooperatives and how they have transformed from their original design to what they are today. Smith considers various pathways for reform to empower rural communities, including how tax status can be leveraged as a new method of reform.

In Rural Legal Markets, Elizabeth Chambliss (University of South Carolina School of Law) explores the realities of the current legal market of private practice in rural South Carolina. Using a mixed-methods study of private practitioners, Chambliss examines the economic and professional structures that shape rural legal markets, identifies the ingredients of sustainable rural practice, and discusses incentives for rural practitioners to engage in pro bono and low-bono services.

In A Tale of Two Landlords, Christopher J. Ryan Jr. (Maurer School of Law) explores the use of legal eviction from the landlord’s perspective, focusing on how costs impact landlords’ behaviors in the formal legal process of eviction. Drawing on over 200,000 eviction cases in Kentucky, the study explores the “economy of eviction,” and finds clear differences between landlords based on their location (rural or urban) and scale of their operations (small or large) when attempting to recoup lost rent or go through the eviction process.

Grace Tracey reviews The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns And What it Means For Our Country by Professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett of the University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy.

This book examines small-town America’s success and challenges the popular rural narratives of crisis.

A periodic collection of recent research, analysis, and other notable rural items.

This spring, the Rural Reconciliation Project convened an interdisciplinary workshop to explore how concentrated economic power shapes rural democracy: who gets to decide what, whose knowledge counts, whose labor is valued, whose ownership is visible, and whether communities are able to imagine and build a future on their own terms.

In Forgotten are the Locals: Structures of Common Differences and the Inauthentic Curation of Western Boom Town Main Streetscapes, author Matthew M. Mars (Public and Applied Humanities, University of Arizona) examines four rural Arizona “main street” streetscapes to better understand these structures function as inauthentic representations of everyday rural life.

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.