Happy 11th Birthday, Legal Ruralism
I nearly forgot--again this year--to commemorate the birthday of my Legal Ruralism Blog (subtitle: a little legal realism about the rural). Last year's milestone birthday slipped right by me. The day of the inaugural post was actually September 3, 2007, so I'm a few days late. Never mind: HAPPY 11th BIRTHDAY, LEGAL RURALISM! The last time I wrote a post about the blog's birthday was on the one year anniversary (roughly), and it featured a photo of Sarah Palin, who had become the face of rural America as John McCain's running mate. Remember all that Main Street v. Wall Street rhetoric from Election 2008? And all that rural bashing that Palin's presence on the national stage elicited? Actually, sounds rather similar to where we are a decade on, thanks to different political actors.
In the last year, I've noticed that Legal Ruralism was cited in a Vera Institute Report on rural jails and that it was cited in a couple of law review articles (e.g., Savannah Law Review and Georgia State Law Review) by scholars other than me. Admittedly, I have cited the blog fairly frequently in my own academic writing because often I put on the blog a "half-baked" idea about a possible rural trend, and those posts later prove useful when I wind up writing an academic article about what has, in fact, proved to be a trend.
Maybe Legal Ruralism is beginning to prove the adage, "if you build it, they will come." Certainly, it has helped several national journalists find me over the past few years, as the media became more interested in rural America in the wake of Trump's election.
Here's the first post, from September, 2007, the first semester I taught my Law and Rural Livelihoods course, which launched simultaneously with the blog:
Three articles in the Sunday New York Times pick up on rural themes and phenomena that we discussed in our first class: lack of anonymity, lack of economic opportunity, and urban use (and abuse) of the rural.
The first story, about a small-town newspaper in western Nebraska, describes a situation similar to the one I described regarding my own home town: complete listings of calls to law enforcement authorities, reported verbatim in the local newspaper. The Nebraska editor is quoted as saying that these reports rival the obituaries in popularity among readers. A look at the reported items indicate that residents of this Nebraska town not only report petty thefts and minor happenings unrelated to law (e.g., squirrel down the chimney), which might go unreported in urban places, but that they also officiously report their neighbors’ activities. One caller told police that a 9-year-old boy was being endangered by mowing his lawn when the child’s mother was “perfectly capable of doing it herself.” In light of limited law enforcement resources in rural areas, what are we to make of such uses of those resources? Do stories such as this effectively refute the familiar images of rural folk as self-sufficient, close-knit and looking out for one another in helpful ways?
The other two articles reflect the lack of opportunity associated with rural areas and discuss two different communities’ debates about how to respond to it. One reports on the 5,000-member Yurok tribe in northern California. Situated along the once salmon-rich Klamath River, the tribe is deciding how to spend $92.6 million in logging proceeds – a figure six times the tribe’s annual budget. Some favor a lump sum distribution to members, while others support investment in programs to address high unemployment, flagging fishing, and the drug and alcohol problems with which the tribe has struggled. Meanwhile, development is afoot: a new gas station and 99 slot machines.
The third article similarly considers the economic struggles of rural folk. Once a thriving paper mill town in northern New Hampshire, Berlin (population 10,000) is trying both to revive its economy -- and to diversify it, “not to put all our eggs in one basket” as the mayor reports. Construction of a federal prison will begin this fall, and the town is developing a 7,500 acre A.T.V. park which it hopes will generate $700,000 in revenue each year.
While developments in both Klamath, California and Berlin, New Hampshire, are generating hope among residents, the extent to which those residents have considered the downsides to such developments are unclear.
Interestingly, the Klamath River and the Hoopa Tribe who depend on it were in the New York Times again this week. Christopher Chavis regularly posts about New Hampshire and elsewhere in New England, as he did here a few days ago. And as for rural self-sufficiency, that was a major theme of this post from a few days ago. So, I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. That's certainly true of the "urban use of rural" label, one of the "tags" I put on that very first post eleven years ago. At this point, more than a decade on, I've used that label more than 100 times, a sad commentary on the ongoing relationship between rural and urban in the United States.
A dear colleague from another institution recently pointed out that someone forgot to tell me that blogging is so yesterday's medium. Maybe so, but students like doing it in my three seminar courses (I also have a Feminist Legal Theory Blog and a Working Class Whites and the Law Blog) because it's a great way to exchange ideas, to have an extended conversation, to sharpen written communication skills. I think I'll stick with it for a while--at least another 11 years.