Law School Rural Educational Offerings

The Necessity of Rural Criminal Law Programming, Coursework, and Rural Experiential Learning Opportunities

Admissions pipelines alone are insufficient. Law schools must develop pipelines that lead graduates to rural criminal law practice. Graduate-level healthcare schools have a well-developed focus on incentives and opportunities for post-graduation rural practice. As of July 1, 2024, there were 179 accredited rural medical residency opportunities in the United States, just in the specialties of family medicine, internal medicine, and psychiatry.62  Nearly 65% of medical schools offered some sort of rural clinical experiences, 20% of medical schools had formal rural training programs, and nearly a quarter of all medical schools offered rural financial aid.63  Similar statistics apply to programs that educate other medical professionals. In May of 2023, nearly 40% of United States pharmacy programs offered rural pharmacy education opportunities.64  A recent study of Bachelor of Science in Nursing Programs found that 38% of programs specifically targeted rural Registered Nurses for recruitment.

Unfortunately, law schools have done comparatively little to encourage rural legal practice—and less still to encourage rural criminal practice. Among the nearly 200 accredited law schools in the United States, only a handful offer formal education in rural practice.  Fewer still address the dire need for rural prosecutors and indigent defense providers.  Formal rural practice pathways are scarce.  Despite evidence that associates rural educational training with an increased likelihood of rural practice,66 law schools rarely offer rural criminal internships, externships, or clinics.

Coursework

Few law schools offer courses about, or even touching on, rural practice. Notable exceptions include:

  • The University of California, Davis Law’s Law & Rural Livelihoods seminar examines how rurality relates to legal areas like criminal justice, poverty, environment and land use.
  • Nebraska Law’s Rural Development and Energy Law course focuses on how energy law shapes rural economies.
  • Michigan Law’s Law in Rural America seminar (and “mini-seminar”68) explores topics like the structure of rural courts and governance, and the effects of urban bias on law and rural communities.
  • South Carolina Law’s Law and Urban/Rural Divide seminar (not currently offered) compared law and policy differences between urban and rural place, and how law has continued to shape rural America.
  • Harvard Law’s Access to Justice and Legal Practice in Rural America reading group (not currently offered) examined how to address the legal needs of rural communities in areas like health, consumer, employment, and criminal law.
  • Concord Law School at Purdue University Global, America’s first fully online law school, offers a virtual Rural Law Practice course focused on issues in rural legal deserts.  The online format is designed to save costs for people in remote areas by delivering lessons virtually.69 (Scholars recommend that law schools explore more flexible instruction options, like this one, to reach more rural residents.)70

Still, only a handful of law schools offer these courses. More law schools must provide classroom instruction about the needs, successes and challenges of rural legal practice. Offerings should include courses addressing solo and small firm practice management, including maintaining licensure in multiple states; ethics and professional responsibility courses dealing with the appropriate use of remote technologies and the conflicts that can arise from a mixed practice and the dense networking of small communities; and criminal law, family law, real estate, probate and estate planning, local government, environmental and agricultural law courses that consider how doctrine plays out in rural spaces. Law schools should talk to their students about the problem of justice-by-geography, rebrand rural work as public interest work, and place their rural opportunities within their public interest offerings.71

Again, law can look to medicine for other examples of rural curricular innovations. Dozens of graduate healthcare programs offer “rural training tracks.72

Externships and Internships

Internships are non-credit bearing programs that place students in law practice environments where they work under a lawyer’s supervision. Externships are similar, but students earn academic credit for the practical learning experience. Because these are onsite learning experiences, internships and externships offer a rare opportunity for law students to spend a portion of their professional education in a rural legal practice setting. Generally, rural-immersive learning experiences are strongly associated with rural professional practice.73 In the legal education system, which does not require the lengthier and more in-depth residence programs common to graduate programs in healthcare and teaching, internships and externships are usually the only opportunity for a significant rural practice experience.

Nationally, there are hundreds of externship and internship programs.  “Generic” programs place law students in a wide range of legal settings that share only the most basic practice characteristics. For example, a “public interest externship” might place students in settings that practice civil rights, elder advocacy, education law, or small business assistance. The accompanying externship seminar is likely to explore those legal practice issues that are common to all participating externs.

Intern and externship placements offer not just work experience but often a pathway to post-graduate placements, and, equally importantly, a preview of the context that will color full time employment in any particular place. This last aspect is particularly crucial in rural areas, where individual relationships and rapport are indispensable.

Rural internships and externships remain somewhat rare. Several factors may account for this. One barrier to rural internships and externships arises from the relational nature of these temporary ‘apprenticeships.’ Broadly, law schools and practitioners must build trusting relationships to place students in appropriate settings. Again, externships demand more effort. Accredited law schools must maintain supervision over attorneys in charge of students74 so that students and placement sites benefit from the instructional and mentorship resources of experienced law faculty. If law schools lack strong connections to rural practice communities, they cannot give their students high quality immersive experiences in rural law practice.

Additionally, for suburban and urban law students, rural practice immersions are often expensive. Unless they are returning to their own rural hometowns, participating students must pay for temporary housing and transportation to remote placements sites. Students who do not own a car must shoulder additional financial burdens for longer-term car rental or forego the rural experience entirely.

Externships programs impose additional costs. As “experiential” components of the standard law school curriculum, externships require students to pay tuition for their externship experience as well as for the associated classroom component. Externships also increase the financial burden on law schools, which must fund faculty to supervise the program and teach the externship seminar.

These costs can be prohibitive. A short-lived Rural Criminal Law Externship at the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at SMU Dedman School of Law successfully placed students in rural prosecutor and public defender offices. Student cohorts were small, but outcomes were promising, with several students accepting permanent jobs in rural prosecution or public defense.75 However, the high costs of tuition, combined with the expenses of summer relocation, made the unsustainable.76

Fortunately, some law schools have secured private or state funding for rural practice externships. The Dane G. Hansen Foundation funds Washburn’s six-credit summer Rural Externship Program. The Foundation covers the externship tuition costs. And provides students with a $5,000 stipend to offset housing, travel, and related expenses. The University of North Dakota Law School offers judicial externship opportunities that are funded by the State Bar Association of North Dakota.

While rural criminal externship programs remain exceedingly rare, there is a unique collaboration between Nevada’s Department of Indigent Defense Services (DIDS) and the William S. Boyd Law School at UNLV offers a promising model. Under the auspices of the Samuel S. Lionel Externship Program, DIDS offers a 10-week externship program in a rural public defense practice. When the DIDS externship launched, participating students received a stipend from the State Bar of Nevada. Since then, DIDS itself has assumed responsibility for the student stipends that support public defender externs in rural Nevada counties.77 Although almost every state is in dire need of rural prosecutors and public defenders, few externships address these critical specialties. The DIDS externship should be replicated nationwide and provide opportunities for prosecutors and defenders.

Non-credit bearing rural internships appear to be wider spread than rural externships.  Some are run by non-profit organizations. Others are coordinated by law schools and bar associations. Equal Justice Works (EJW), a nonprofit organization that promotes civil legal aid hosts the largest national program for public interest lawyer recruitment and placement.78 Equal Justice Works’ Rural Summer Legal Corps, a partnership with the federal Legal Services Corporation (LSC), provides a stipend of $7,000 to law students who complete eight to ten weeks of summer work with a non-profit civil legal services provider. There is no similar national non-profit program that promotes summer experiences in rural criminal practice.

On the internship front, the University of Alabama’s Finch Fellowship Initiative places students with judges in rural areas for half a summer. Students engage in a variety of kinds of legal proceedings, participate in community-oriented projects, and develop their professional networks. They receive a $4,000 stipend and provide a concluding report on their experiences.

Similarly, the Idaho Heritage Project’s Rural Services Scholarship Fund University offers scholarships to students who participate in rural summer internships, with past recipients having taken up prosecutorial and public defense positions.

Several state courts and bar associations partnered with law schools have launched their own rural legal internship programs—many also provide students with stipends for transportation, room, and board. Indiana University’s Rural Justice Initiative at the Maurer School of Law places first-year law students in trial court judges’ chambers during the summer and provides them with a 1½-day training on civil, criminal, and access-to-justice issues, as well as a $4,000 stipend. The Texas Indigent Defense Commission has proposed legislative funding for rural public defense summer internships.79

A comparison between these nascent rural legal immersions and the more well-established rural healthcare rotations and residencies demonstrates how far behind the legal community is. Law schools must work with bar associations, state prosecutors’ organizations, and indigent defense provider to increase the number and quality of rural criminal law internships and externships. They should solicit funds from private foundations and state and local governments to provide scholarship support for rural prosecution and defense externships that provide law students with immersive educational experiences in rural criminal practice.

Clinics

Rural clinical programs can be another powerful practice immersion. Clinics are law practices run by law school faculty and staff. Under state ‘student practice’ rules, and under the close supervision of a licensed attorney, clinic students serve as lawyers, representing clients in a wide range of settings. In addition to providing an immersive rural training, a rural law clinic can teach students “soft skills” that are uniquely important to rural practice, such as cooperative work in “unstructured situations,” operation of a solo or small firm practice, and careful navigation of the overlapping personal and professional relationships they develop with rural colleagues and clients.81

A rural law clinic almost always depends upon a rural law school location. So law school locations are often a limiting factor. Dozens of urban law schools would find it almost impossible to offer a rural law clinic. Other law schools may be rural adjacent or part of a micro-metro community and can therefore easily provide services to rural residents. And rural law schools, almost by definition, routinely offer rural law clinics. Prominent examples include:

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law offers a one-credit course on divorce law and the history of the Arkansas Delta. The course involves visiting courthouses; creating educational materials for pro se representation; and conducting outreach, education sessions, and intake for the subsequent Delta Divorce Clinic, in which students provide direct representation.

Some rural law clinics focus on criminal legal practice. Texas Tech University’s Caprock Regional Public Defender Office and Clinic, trains third-year law students to defend clients in rural West Texas counties near the more urban city of Lubbock. The program is a unique collaboration between the university, counties, and the state. Counties contribute small fees on a per-case basis, and the state-funded Texas Indigent Defense Commission covers most of the program’s operating expenses.82

And the University of Maine Law School now runs a unique off-campus Rural Practice Clinic in Fort Kent, Maine.  (Fort Kent sits at the northern border with Canada, a five hour drive from the Law School’s Portland campus).83 Students live in the Fort Kent community and work for local low-income clients.84 This legislatively enacted program is funded with seed money from the Maine Attorney General. As an added bonus, the clinic trains students to handle a wide range of cases, including criminal defense, thereby mimicking the experience of a rural general practitioner.85

Western New England School of Law has succeeded in funneling students to take court-appointed criminal cases in rural areas of shortage through its Criminal Law Defense Practicum. Students in the clinic work with either public defender offices or appointed counsel in two rural counties in Western Massachusetts, handling both misdemeanor and felony cases and gaining exposure to bail hearings, motion sessions, and trials. The school also hosts a corresponding Criminal Law Prosecution Practicum, in which students are placed in the prosecutor’s office in one of the two counties in which the Defense Practicum operates to handle misdemeanors and felonies at all phases from initial appearance through trial.

Rural Pro Bono

Pro bono and volunteering opportunities can form a meaningful complement to curricular offerings. The University of South Carolina operates the Palmetto LEADER, a mobile law office where law students assist pro bono attorneys providing free legal services to rural and underserved communities. The mobile bus visits locations based on factors like poverty data and access to legal services. Similarly, alternative spring breaks can offer students a brief but fully immersive look into rural work. Many such programs offer rural opportunities, and some offer rural criminal experiences. For example, for over a decade, Denver University Sturm College of Law Alternative Spring Break students have taken up weeklong placements in rural areas serving in prosecutor’s and public defender offices, among others. Similar programming exists through UC Irvine’s Alternative Spring Break, which, for the first time in Spring 2026, took students with previous criminal law experience to rural Maine to practice under the Aroostook County public defender. Students got practice on their feet in misdemeanor court and contributed to research for felony cases.

Career Services Counseling

Law school career services offices (LCSOs) must work with networks of rural employers and rural alumni. LCSOs can promote rural practice by inviting rural employees and practitioners to campus, hosting rural practice events, and promoting the benefits of a rural criminal law career.86 As they engage with rural alumni and rural employers, LCSOs learn what employers need from new rural practitioners. Sharing that information with law faculty can help schools develop curricula that redress rural legal knowledge and skills gaps, better preparing students for rural practice and serve those communities’ needs.87

LCSOs must work towards a cultural shift in this area. They should stress the leadership opportunities that rural work presents. Rural practice should be positioned as prestigious and noble, a form of public interest work for highly motivated students. To this end, state judges working in, or covering, rural areas, including state supreme court justices, should consider reserving clerkships for students with rural experience or a commitment to enter rural practice.

Building rural practice communities for law school students can also help build graduating cohorts who support each other in their journey to rural practice. The Finch Society, for example, is a law-student-run organization that promotes small town practice and access to justice, with chapters at the University of Arkansas and University of Maine.

At the University of Mississippi Law School, the student-run Magnolia Defenders have taken matters into their own hands. While Magnolia Defenders seeks to create a robust community of future public defenders.” Their goals include “self-education on the role of public defense,” “advocacy and direct action related to current issues affecting the public defense legal profession and the criminal justice system,” and “communicat[ion] and connect[ion] with alumni” to develop Mississippi public defense networks. Magnolia Defenders have participated in local and national rural public defense programming.88

State and national bar associations must help law school career counselors develop rural practice pathways and recruitment networks. The Federal Office of Rural Health Policy helps to support the National Rural Recruitment and Retention Network (3RNET). Member organizations include healthcare graduate schools, state offices of rural health, rural practitioners, and non-profit rural health organizations.89 3RNET has an impressive national reach.  There is a 3RNET Coordinator in each state, as well as in the Cherokee Nation and the Northern Mariana Islands. Other federal agencies, such as the Indian Health Service and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also participate.90 The 3RNET website provides a rural healthcare employment exchange for rural job seekers and employers. Critically, 3RNET trains graduate schools in how to help students find rural employment and teaches employers how to recruit rural professionals. It also offers employers a six-part online training program in how to “recruit for retention.”91 In 2022-2023, 3RNET’s rural employment exchange website reported 3,736 rural placements.92

The legal community would benefit from similar efforts. While many scholars have written about strategies to drive rural recruitment, but those publications are not easily accessible to practitioners, nor do they offer the straightforward “how to” format that would help law schools and rural employers build direct collaborations.93

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