Getting To Court Can Pose Barrier To Justice In Rural America

In rural areas of the U.S., many people live great distances from courthouses and other legal services, creating major barriers to justice and taking a toll on residents, lawyers and legal personnel.

In areas without reliable public transit, residents must find and pay for rides if they cannot drive themselves. Some may need to line up childcare and absorb the financial hit of missed days of work. Long commutes also burden rural lawyers, who routinely log extended hours behind the wheel.

Solutions such as remote hearings and traveling courts have helped make the legal system more accessible, but these programs also run into barriers, such as a lack of rural broadband access.

A 2025 project from the National Center for State Courts found that while many live close to courthouses, residents face huge driving distances in areas across the country.

This is especially true in Western states, where counties tend to be larger, increasing potential distance to the county courthouse. In large parts of Nevada, residents must travel 80 miles or more to a courthouse. In a few areas of Montana, the distance exceeds 150 miles.

"In some of the Western states that just have these vast areas, traveling to the courthouse is quite the commitment," said Miriam Hamilton, a research analyst who helped build the National Center for State Courts maps. While some legal tasks can be done online, she said, others require lawyers, litigants, witnesses, victims of crime, or anyone else involved in a court proceeding to come in person.

Distance can magnify access issues connected to poverty. Even in urban areas, some people struggle to take time off work, pay for childcare, or find an affordable way to get to a courthouse. These issues become a challenge when people have to travel long distances, said Daria Fisher Page, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and director of its Community Empowerment Law Project.

"I think about clients I had in D.C. who would have to ask a friend for a ride to court, and maybe it was a 20-minute drive. ... If it's an hour, it's just such a different calculation," she said.

Those barriers can result in psychological stress and financial pressures, she said, and can prevent some people from showing up to court at all. Even if failing to appear might have major long-term consequences, she said, "it doesn't feel as immediate as, 'How am I going to pay my rent?'"

For criminal defendants, the difficulties associated with traveling to courthouses could affect the outcome of their cases, said Camilla Hsu, a senior policy attorney for the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law in Texas.

"The process becomes the punishment," Hsu said. "Having to show up to court, having to take time off work to find a way to get there to cover these large distances can itself ultimately incentivize people to plead guilty for reasons not having to do with their underlying guilt."

The courthouse distances also put a strain on attorneys working in rural areas — and potentially dissuade lawyers from taking on cases that involve a lot of driving time.

In the sprawling Lone Star State, where roughly half of the state's 254 counties meet the American Bar Association definition for legal deserts of there being more than 1,000 residents per attorney, lawyers may be disincentivized from accepting criminal appointments if they are not properly compensated for their time behind the wheel, which in turn reinforces the problem of not having enough attorneys, Hsu said.

"Having to drive really long distances, obviously, to courthouses and jails to meet clients and witnesses eats into lawyers' availability for actual lawyering work," Hsu said.

Lack of transportation options in the state also prevents some clients from reaching attorneys, according to Ashley Oborn, director of data analytics for Lone Star Legal Aid.

"Transportation is one of the most significant barriers to access to justice in rural Texas because a service can exist, a client can qualify, and the legal need can be urgent, yet access still fails if there is no practical way to get there," Oborn said.

"In many communities, the challenge is no longer just where lawyers are located, but whether people have a realistic way to reach the lawyers who remain," she added.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where Beth LaCosse, a federal public defender based in Marquette, Michigan, said many lawyers are "road warriors."

In parts of the Upper Peninsula, travel distances to courthouses are more than a 70-mile drive, according to National Center for State Courts data, unlike the state's Lower Peninsula, with metro areas such as Detroit and Grand Rapids, where such distances rarely exceed 30 miles.

Additionally, no Article III judges are based in the Upper Peninsula. For part of the year, judges and staff come up for a week at a time to hear cases, but from December to March, the only federal judges in Marquette are magistrate judges. Marquette is the biggest city in the Upper Peninsula and the only one that is home to a federal courthouse.

Those winter months also make for dangerous driving conditions. LaCosse recalled driving the 140 miles from Escanaba to St. Ignace, Michigan, for a preliminary hearing during a snowstorm earlier in her career. The roads were so bad, she said, "the last 10 miles I was sobbing in my car." Visibility was so low she knew she couldn't stop for fear of being rear-ended.


When she eventually made it to the courthouse, she learned that the hearing was delayed because the judge overseeing the case had gotten stuck on the far side of the Mackinac Bridge, the only way to drive between the Upper and Lower peninsulas.

Today, LaCosse says that many of her clients are housed in a prison in Chippewa County, a 2.5-hour drive from the federal court in Marquette, and some are incarcerated in Newaygo, a six-hour drive. LaCosse herself is sometimes assigned cases in the Southern Division of the Western District of Michigan, which means a six- to seven-hour drive to Kalamazoo or Lansing.

"If you haven't been up there and experienced it, you can be driving down a road and not see a car or person or house for a really long time," she said.

In Search of Solutions

Finding workarounds for the distance is difficult. An obvious solution is to allow for more remote hearings. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, courts have been more open to virtual options.

Probate Judge Daryl Vizina in Cheboygan County, Michigan, said that holding hearings over Zoom has been a huge help.

However, he added, "We have a lot of areas within the county that don't have high-speed internet, or the internet is hit or miss."

While they can be helpful, especially for clients who would otherwise have to make a 2.5-hour bus trip for a 30-minute hearing, LaCosse said virtual hearings often lack "a human touch."

One solution from the perspective of access is something like a traveling court, Fisher Page of the University of Iowa said.

However, such programs are a challenge for judges and court personnel to sustain in the long term. They require resources, both financial and human, that aren't available, she noted.

"In Iowa, we have lots of courts that are already not fully staffed and lots of vacant judicial positions," she said.

Eric Schultheis with Vermont Legal Aid said a program that recently got federal funding in his state marries traveling courts with virtual access. It involves vans that can be driven to rural residents' homes and set up to provide secure virtual access and a conference-type space so people can attend hearings virtually.

The program is still being worked out, he said, but it could prove useful, especially for older residents who are less familiar with technology and less able to drive long distances.

Christine Bawol, a court administrator, said that a court navigator program in Mackinac County, Michigan, shows promise. Dedicated personnel are available to help self-represented litigants navigate the court system for issues like landlord-tenant disputes or divorces. Right now, navigators are based in courthouses, but in the future they could be stationed in libraries or township halls, making for shorter drives.

In Texas, the state Supreme Court, through a new Rural Justice Initiative, aims to create a network of 170 rural outposts for civil legal services across the state.

The Texas Access to Justice Foundation announced last week that it has received $26.7 million from the high court to kick off the initiative.

Texas Supreme Court Justice Brett Busby said court officials have heard from legal services groups about clients who "travel 2.5 hours or more to get to a legal aid office, and not everybody can do that because they don't have time off from work, or they may not have access to transportation or childcare."

"We really want to bring these services to Texans where they are, and this grant is about building the infrastructure that will let us do that on an ongoing basis," Justice Busby said.

Without broader solutions, lawyers in rural areas continue to do what they can to make it work.

LaCosse recalled a time when one of her cases from the Upper Peninsula was being heard in the southern part of the state during the months when no Article III judges travel to the Upper Peninsula. The lawyers arranged for a hotel for a key witness, who was still uneasy about making the trip.

He made it, LaCosse remembered, but didn't have money for food, something that wouldn't have been a problem if the case had been heard closer to home. When the lawyers realized, they paid for a pizza.

--Editing by Daniel King.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misattributed a quote. The error has been corrected.