Look around rural America and you’ll see small towns losing population and suffering brain drain. Look closer, and you’ll notice lawyers are aging and not being replaced by new graduates. Doing nothing is not an option, rural residents deserve legal representation. States are now experimenting with policies to incentivize rural law practice, but ten years ago, South Dakota was first. Based on interviews with rural lawyers, The Rural Lawyer shows how rural incentive programs can work, what it is like to begin a law career in rural America, and how rural lawyers can help small communities thrive.

Introducing the rural lawyer shortage through its impact on rural America, the introduction makes the case that rural areas matter and policy responses are justified to help rural America.

Many states have realized there is a shortage of lawyers in rural areas and have decided to improve legal access in rural communities. This chapter surveys the current approaches to increasing access to justice or access to lawyers in rural areas. South Dakota has the earliest and most robust program, and the origin of that program is shared in detail.

The twentieth century dawned on a regional, southern-based African American community on the verge of diasporic national change. Decades before the Great Urban Migration, Black individuals had migrated west as homesteaders, cowboys, soldiers, and town-builders, participating in the project of Manifest Destiny. But by the early 1900s, the “frontier” was receding into the realms of myth and memory, and white writers such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister wondered what would become of American manhood once the “Wild West” disappeared in the new, industrializing order. Black male writers, who had themselves sought to establish masculine credentials by joining frontier conquest, wondered too. Nat Love, a former slave turned ranch hand, and Oscar Micheaux, a farmer turned filmmaker, recorded their experiences, respectively, in their memoirs The Life and Adventures of Nat Love and The Conquest. In their writings can be seen the literary tension between the “Wild West” of violence and savagery and the “agrarian West” being settled by farmers and ethnic groups from across the world.

The voters in both Florida and South Dakota approved the adoption of a Missouri Plan system for appellate courts, Florida in the 1970s and South Dakota in 1980. Voters in both states later rejected extending the system to trial courts. The adoption of the Missouri Plan for Florida’s appellate courts in 1976 came in the wake of a series of scandals involving the justices of the Florida Supreme Court. Two years later and then again 22 years later, Florida’s Constitution Revision Commission put the question of whether to extend the Missouri Plan to the trial courts before the voters, who then rejected the proposed change. The impetus for change in selection/retention of South Dakota’s Supreme Court justices appears to have come largely from the state bar. In 1980, the voters approved a Missouri Plan system for the South Dakota Supreme Court and did not divide along party lines. In the early 2000s, a proposal to extend the system to the trial courts was presented to the voters, who rejected the proposal.