Legal services in rural areas: problems of access and local need

In contemporary western societies laws are part of the basic institutional framework within which people order their lives, and access to authoritative, professional advice and support on legal matters is often crucial for the protection of citizens and their rights. The factors which govern the distribution of, and access to, legal services should, therefore, be a matter of fundamental concern to human geography. However, although the literature on rural service provision is voluminous (Neate, 1981; Gilg, 1981-86), it largely ignores legal and, for that matter, most other private professional services (Economides, 1982). The most important exception is medical services which have been widely studied and do provide some interesting parallels with legal services, since they too are dependent financially on a mixture of public and private provision. In the United Kingdom doctors who are general practitioners are paid according to the number of patients on their lists, while the amount of money that solicitors receive from the publicly-funded Legal Aid scheme depends entirely on the number of eligible clients who choose to use their services. The picture that emerges from the studie