Hannah Haksgaard’s new book, The Rural Lawyer: How to Incentivize Rural Law Practice and Help Small Communities Thrive, offers a robust, multifaceted analysis of the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in South Dakota, where the author lives and works. This final detail – where the author lives and works – is an important one, for the book masterfully balances interview data with personal history, policy, and economic analyses with candid asides. It is as much a how-to manual as it is a labor of love. And above all else, it is written and assembled with great care.

Here, we find Haksgaard tracing the work and lives of the lawyers who took part in the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program. As per legislation passed in 2013, each of these participants received a stipend for committing to practice in a rural South Dakota community for five years. When Haksgaard begins her research at the 10-year mark, 24 of the original 32 attorneys remain in practice in their rural communities. The author’s central question is largely evaluative: What have participants’ experiences been like? What are their views of the program? From these reflections, the book provides “a modern account of how new rural lawyers settle into their careers” (10), with generative insights for other rural areas looking to craft similar programs; for rural attorneys seeking to improve their practices; and for law schools and communities aiming to support new rural attorneys. As someone who has followed the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program with interest since its inception, I know this story well. Yet I read Haksgaard’s book with deep interest, and with deep appreciation for her rigorous, quiet retelling.

Through in-depth interviews with the program’s participating lawyers, mentoring attorneys, and other key players, we learn about what it takes to recruit and retain rural attorneys, both in the profession and in the community. And with Haksgaard’s inclusion of maps, tables, participant biographies, and photos (taken by the author’s spouse during her fieldwork), this book is compellingly arranged, even beautiful.

Refreshingly, The Rural Lawyer is not a punchy take-down or defense of rural America. Rather, the author’s tone is consistently measured. “Imagine we indulged the angry commentators,” Haksgaard writes (5). And she does to a point, with her analysis overviewing the different political and financial forces, as well as public narratives and mythologies, at play in rural attorney shortages. Still, the only space where Haksgaard appears to really take offense is the academic literature on rurality, which overwhelmingly fails to notice the important role that rural attorneys play, or at least could play, in rural communities (19–20). Is this a failure of scholarship, I wonder, or does it say more about the siloed nature of the professions? In either case, The Rural Lawyer addresses this gap in an urgent, compelling way.

There are tensions in the Rural Attorney Recruitment model, which Haksgaard herself identifies. Is the program a way to get lawyers into small towns? To help those starting a solo practice, or to support small firms? To promote participants with local connections, or to help lawyers without preexisting social ties? To increase access to justice (A2J)? Haksgaard is forthright about the book’s concern being lawyers and not their clients, even though the program itself is designed to facilitate more direct client work. This is admittedly where the limits of the study emerge, for The Rural Lawyer is not actually about rural people’s own needs or preferences, nor is it about access to justice in a robust sense. Ultimately, this book is about traditional modes of legal service delivery, which is why Haksgaard’s brief discussion of other potential access to justice solutions (168) is confined to virtual meetings with remote attorneys, fillable self-help forms, and telephone information hotlines, options that are often touted by legal professionals as providing “access” – even as they have been largely refuted in the empirical A2J literature (see, e.g., Quintanilla et al. Reference Quintanilla, Hugenberg, Hagan, Gonzales, Hutchings, Yel and Engstrom2023; Statz et al. Reference Statz, Friday and Bredeson2021). Nowhere does this book recognize other A2J models that have been documented to provide the trusted, affordable, and rurally-representative advocacy many rural people prefer, such as community justice workers or Tribal lay advocates. Identifying an incentive program as an access to justice solution without contextualizing it as one among many – or expressly acknowledging how diverse rural individuals themselves may understand “access” – is a clear limitation of this text. It is also a reminder of this book’s very focused audience. After all, The Rural Lawyer is ultimately about, and largely for, lawyers.

Of course, that is not a bad thing. I loved reading this book. It reminded me at times of Alvin Ziontz’s A Lawyer in Indian Country (Ziontz Reference Ziontz2011), which, like The Rural Lawyer, deftly crosses genres as a public history, policy analysis, and lawyering memoir. While neither text makes the kinds of theoretical, interdisciplinary contributions we often find in LSR, Haksgaard and Ziontz are at once authoritative, reflexive, and deeply respectful in their legal – and personal – accounts. “Because this entire book is premised on the idea that rural America matters,” writes Haksgaard, “it is worth explaining why it does, both to me and to the other people who reside there” (4). It is this, Haksgaard’s persistently humanizing approach, that is why The Rural Lawyer should still be read by sociolegal scholars. It is what enables us to see ourselves in this story – or, at the very least, to feel concern for, and even accountability to, the people she describes.

After all, just as Haksgaard is rigorous in her evaluation of the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, so also does she apply a nuanced analysis to everyday life. Describing the participants who left the program early, for instance, she notes that these departures can be understood “as policy failures, or [as] inevitable transitions that happened as part of changing lives” (39). With real care, she comprehensively offers us both views. And she does this steadily throughout the book, openly grappling with the program’s promise and its imperfections, the burdens of small town practice and the rewards, and the hopes and risks of trying anything – whether rural lawyering, building a new model for rural attorney recruitment, or writing a book. This multidimensionality, a hallmark of Haksgaard’s work, makes for good reading and good scholarship.