Rural Justice: Country Lawyers and Legal Services in the United States and Britain

Abstract

Landon's Country Lawyers and Blacksell, Economides, and Watkins's (BEW) Justice outside the City both focus on and legal services in the countryside. Since most of the research has taken place in urban settings, this is a timely adjustment of the dominant research perspectives. Still, their approaches differ. Landon's book fits well into the tradition of legal profession studies. He attempts to describe the social forces that form the rural bar and to understand the contextual forces shaping the work of lawyers (Landon at xix). BEW offer a policy-oriented analysis aimed at improving rural justice, examining the work of solicitors as well as that of Citizen Advice Bureaux, paralegals, and informal advisers. The studies both use surveys as the main data source. Landon uses three sets of data. The two of his own were gathered in rural Missouri in 1982-83 and in a middle-sized city-Springfield, Missouri (population 150,000). The rural Missouri data includes interviews with 201 practicing in 94 counties and 116 communities. He compares his data to