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On Shared Suffering: Judicial Intimacy in the Rural Northland
Author(s) -
Statz Michele
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
law and society review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.867
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1540-5893
pISSN - 0023-9216
DOI - 10.1111/lasr.12537
Subject(s) - grassroots , impossibility , embodied cognition , economic justice , state (computer science) , resistance (ecology) , ethnography , sociology , social justice , rural area , criminology , creativity , law , political science , politics , epistemology , ecology , algorithm , computer science , anthropology , biology , philosophy
Rural state and tribal court judges in the upper US Midwest offer an embodied alternative to prevailing understandings of “access to justice.” Owing to the high density of social acquaintanceship, coupled with the rise in unrepresented litigants and the impossibility of most proposed state access to justice initiatives, what ultimately makes a rural courtroom accessible to parties without counsel is the judge . I draw on over four years of ethnographic fieldwork and an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to illuminate the lived consequences and global implications of judges' responses, which can be read as grassroots‐level creativity, as resistance, or simply as “getting by.”