In his seminal work, Feeley argued that most solutions to reforming criminal courts would fail due to the fragmentation of courts, the adversarialism of United States case processing and the fallacy of formalism (the reliance of formal description of the criminal justice process for diagnosing and remedying problems) (refer to Feeley, 2013). Although rural courts do face these obstacles to reforming their courtrooms, they face additional obstacles based on the rural context in which they operate.

United States court reformers, such as the twentieth-century legal scholar Roscoe Pound (1870–1964), have advocated for a highly centralized hierarchical court system that is administered by some form of state supreme court, with most funding coming from the state. However, this kind of formal model assumes that all rural courts are included in one unified court system and would be funded directly by the state. For example, in New York, as in other states in the United States, there is a fragmented patchwork of approximately 1,200 rural courts that do not fall under the purview of the ‘Unified Court System’. Rather, they are technically overseen by a different agency. Therefore, any reform measure that the Unified Court System instituted would not reach the rural courts, in part because of this fragmentation.

Even if there was state funding for rural courts, there would still be competition with urban courts for resources. Given that funding has traditionally followed a formula that takes a court’s caseload into account, rural courts would receive limited funding. This is a result of rural courts having fewer cases than urban courts. In addition, there would still need to be some form of local funds (county, town, city and so on) dedicated to implementing reforms because no state court system is completely funded by the state. In rural areas in the United States, this is particularly daunting because rural communities traditionally have lower tax bases owing to smaller populations. Consequentially, rural communities are required to do more with less. In other words, mandates and reforms put further financial stress on rural areas with fewer resources.