Conceptualising Rural Access to Justice as Supply Chains Primed for Transformation

This chapter is shared with express permission of Bloomsbury Academic. The full book is available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/access-to-justice-in-rural-communities-9781509951642/The justice gap persists in many rural parts of the world due to a confluence of economic, cultural, and professional factors at play throughout the justice system and society at large. This justice gap means that people in rural areas experience institutions of justice – including access to lawyers and other legal advice – differently than people in urban areas. Travel, distance, the rural lawyer shortage, and other factors create this difference. No single factor or institution can be blamed for the rural lawyer shortage or the inability of many rural people to otherwise adequately resolve the legal issues in their lives, nor can any single person or programme fix the rural lawyer shortage or meet presently unmet rural legal needs. In this chapter we propose an alternative understanding of the rural lawyer shortage and the rural access to justice crisis, one that frames the myriad rural access to justice challenges as a host of opportunities yet to be leveraged in concert rather than as a series of discrete legal resources intended to address discrete legal problems. Through this broader lens, the entirety of the rural justice gap can be conceptualised as a poorly calibrated supply chain, ready for transformation