ABSTRACT
The ‘justice gap’ describes a seemingly simple phenomenon: The difference between a community’s civil legal needs and the supply of resources to address those needs. Yet this simple equation has dire consequences, particularly for low-income and rural Americans. Our ability to measure legal need and supply with relative ease and accuracy is critical as measurements of these elements dictate the allocation of scarce resources to increase access to justice.
This article theorizes our concept of legal vulnerability and presents the contours of a legal vulnerability index to measure this concept. It is an extension of our earlier work interrogating the relationship between the decline in rural attorneys and rural access to justice. We draw on decades of rich scholarship and dialogue around social vulnerability in order to better parse the conditions that make a legal need likely; the nature of that need; and how it becomes an unmet legal need. As geographers use social vulnerability to anticipate how different communities will experience natural disasters, legal vulnerability allows us to anticipate how different communities may experience civil legal problems.
Legal vulnerability is a prerequisite to legal need: It describes the potential for a given community to experience justice problems, events (like several missed car payments or the unraveling of a marriage) that have civil legal underpinnings or consequences. Historically, legal needs surveys were the primary tool for understanding the type and frequency of legal problems, though the tool has practical and theoretical shortcomings. The legal vulnerability index (‘LVI’) we propose in this article, in turn, would use Census and other publicly available data to measure the likelihood that individuals with certain characteristics (eg, low-income), histories (eg, veteran status), and contexts (eg, limited access to public transportation) may develop civil legal problems (eg, unpaid car payments and debt collection lawsuits). The LVI will rely on readily available and replicable data and allow for meaningful comparisons between communities. Rather than capturing information about justice problems in the past, the LVI will give us forward-looking insights. The LVI will be a useful tool in several contexts and has the potential to provide much-needed awareness and understanding of the justice problems of rural communities, the differences between rural communities, and the tailoring of interventions to increase access to justice in rural areas.
Farrell, Brian Richard and Fisher Page, Daria and Sakoda, Ryan, Theorizing Legal Vulnerability to Enhance Rural Access to Justice (June 14, 2024), South Dakota Law Review, volume 69, issue 3; University Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper Forthcoming.
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