“Life in the Vast Lane,” a poster popular in these parts, depicts a North Dakota two-lane highway surrounded by green prairie grasslands and cloudless blue sky. Other than the road itself, the landscape appears unaltered from its indigenous state. The poster captures North Dakotans’ pride in the rural character of the state—encompassing areas of undeveloped open space and small farming and ranching communities—as well as the spirit of the people who live here. With a population of less than 757,000 spread across some 70,000 square miles, North Dakota is one of five states with a population density of less than eleven people per square mile.
The population densities of North Dakota’s fifty-three counties range from a high of about eighty-five people per square mile in Cass County (Fargo) to a low of an average of less than one person per square mile in Slope County. Over half of the counties in the state have less than 5000 residents.
With only 1665 licensed attorneys located in the state, North Dakota is among a handful of states with the fewest lawyers. A relatively low number of lawyers serving a largely rural state means that North Dakota’s rural counties are facing a crisis in terms of the availability of legal services. With just 1.3 lawyers per 1000 people in the state’s rural areas, “[y]ou’re looking at rather vast expanses of territory for one lawyer to cover.” In 2015, three counties had no resident attorneys, six counties had only one resident attorney (three of whom were over sixty years old), and seven counties had only two resident attorneys (five of whom were over sixty years old). In these sixteen counties, there are twenty attorneys to serve more than 54,000 people living across 19,000 square miles (over one quarter of the state’s land area). Additionally, there were ten counties with three attorneys, five counties with four attorneys, and two counties with five attorneys. Only eighty-five of North Dakota’s 357 cities and towns have lawyers with registered firm addresses.
Though keenly felt in North Dakota, the crisis of access to justice in rural communities spans the nation:
A disproportionate percentage of people living in poverty live in rural communities in the United States. At the same time, there are very few attorneys providing legal services in rural communities, and their numbers are dwindling. In fact, in many rural counties in the United States, there are no practicing attorneys, and in some rural states, residents must travel hundreds of miles to the nearest legal services office or private firm attorney. Similarly, public defenders are scarce in rural America, often traveling circuits, similar to ways in which judges travel circuits and sit in courthouses just one day a week in certain communities.
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In addition, a high percentage of the few attorneys practicing law in rural America are aging out of the practice of law without plans or prospects for carrying on their practices.
As an ABA Journal article on the shortage of attorneys in rural areas summarized: “All this creates a ‘justice gap,’ with legal needs going unmet because potential clients can’t find a lawyer, or they can’t afford the lawyers they can find.”
In 2012, the American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates passed a resolution urging states “to support efforts to address the decline in the number of lawyers practicing in rural areas and to address access to justice issues for residents in rural America.”
The ABA resolution coincided with a task force report detailing the impact of North Dakota’s oil boom, and the resulting rapid increase in population, on the state’s justice system. The report found that the increasing demands on the justice system indicated that there simply were insufficient numbers of attorneys, judges, and court staff to adequately serve the state’s needs. The strain on the justice system was particularly severe in western North Dakota, where felony cases increased by as much as eighty-five percent and civil case filings in areas such as probate and trust doubled over five years. The report warned of a “constitutional crisis rapidly approaching” in representation for indigent criminal defendants and emphasized the growing civil legal services needs of low-income people.