Rural America and Rural Wisconsin: Legal Deserts, or Less So?

During the past twenty years, the American Bar Association and many state bars have repeatedly proclaimed there to be an acute shortage of lawyers in rural America. A grim picture is painted of “legal deserts”: rural counties beset by a shrinking population of lawyers (in some cases, no lawyers at all) and a widespread reluctance of younger lawyers to forgo the attractions of urban life in order to fill the gap. The argument is that the shortage threatens access to justice and even basic respect for the rule of law in much of the nation.

Counties with Five or Fewer Lawyers, 2020
(generated from a template provided courtesy of mapchart.org)Five or Fewer Lawyers

On such premises, since 2008, nearly half of all states, including Wisconsin, have created rural lawyer recruitment (RLR) programs. These RLR programs variously provide stipends, student loan repayment subsidies, and government legal positions for lawyers willing to commit to rural practice for a set period of time; stipends for students willing to intern with rural lawyers; and support and training for rural practice. Yet to date, most RLR programs have been based on incomplete analysis and ad hoc solutions.

Continue ReadingRural America and Rural Wisconsin: Legal Deserts, or Less So?

A Rebellion of Giants: Dixon, Ryan, and Taming the Railroads in the Gilded Age

Chief Justice Luther S. Dixon
Chief Justice
Luther S. Dixon

This is the fifth in a series of Schoone Fellowship Field Notes.

Eastern jurists such as John Marshall, James Kent, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Benjamin Cardozo have received the lion’s share of attention from law professors and historians over the years. Two fellow giants from the Midwest, Michigan’s Thomas Cooley and Iowa’s John Dillon, have been relegated to comparative obscurity.

Cooley and Dillon played a central role in shaping the contours of modern American constitutional law. They forged their philosophies in the heat of two critical judicial debates over the role of railroads in American society. Two Wisconsin justices, Luther Dixon and Edward Ryan, were also leaders in those debates, and their contributions to American constitutional law deserve to be better known.

Continue ReadingA Rebellion of Giants: Dixon, Ryan, and Taming the Railroads in the Gilded Age

Wisconsin: The Final Firework in the Antislavery Legal Movement

Lemuel Shaw
Mass. Chief Justice
Lemuel Shaw

This is the fourth in a series of Schoone Fellowship Field Notes.

Putting Wisconsin’s antislavery heritage in perspective. Wisconsin takes great pride in its antislavery heritage, particularly the Northwest Ordinance (1787), which ensured that Wisconsin would be a free state, and the Booth Cases (1854, 1859), in which Wisconsin stood alone in defying the federal government’s attempt to turn northerners into slavecatchers. This pride is justified but needs perspective. When Wisconsin arrived on the American stage as a new state (1848), American slavery was two centuries old and the legal reaction against slavery had been underway for 70 years. The Booth Cases were important, but they were merely the final fireworks in the drama of American law and slavery.

Continue ReadingWisconsin: The Final Firework in the Antislavery Legal Movement
Older Posts