The University of Richmond Law Review is honored to present its 2023 Symposium Issue: Overlooked America: Addressing Legal Issues Facing Rural United States. Each year, the University of Richmond Law Review hosts a Symposium for scholars and practitioners to engage with a specific area of law. In a time when our country seems more divided than ever, discussions surrounding law and policy frequently diverge not just on political lines, but on regional lines as well. Rural regions of the United States are routinely evoked in the political sphere, but rarely are the problems and disparities that exist in rural America appropriately addressed by policymakers, media outlets, and scholarly sources alike. This year’s Symposium aimed to explore these underrepresented and misunderstood regions to foster inclusion of rural communities, peoples, and issues in legal scholarship.

Kelly M. Boppe *

* Symposium Editor, University of Richmond Law Review

With many ready to dismiss non-urban life as a relic of history, rural America’s place in the future is in question. The rural role in the American past is understandably more apparent. As the story of urbanization goes in the United States and elsewhere, the majority of the population used to live in rural places, including small towns and sparsely populated counties. A substantial proportion of those people worked in agriculture, manufacturing, or extractive industries. But trends associated with modernity—mechanization, automation, globalization, and environmental conservation, for instance—have reduced the perceived need for a rural workforce. Roughly since the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, rural depopulation has continued with some consistency. In 1940, the U.S. rural population peaked at 57% of the total population. Today, that proportion is 14%.

Rural populations’ presence in distressed regions borne of fading legacy industries raises questions of whether it is a beneficial use of scarce public resources to support rural regions, and whether the rural way of life is consistent with modern needs. And thus, the fate of the 14% and their communities, at least in the most struggling regions, is in question.

While many urbanites are quick to dismiss rural issues as niche issues, geographic inequality, rurality, and rural livelihoods are implicated in one way or another in virtually all the crises described above. Framing the countryside as obsolescent or superfluous overlooks fundamental aspects of the often-invisible urban-rural interdependence that undergirds American life. Cities still rely heavily on rural resources and workers and will need to do so even more in the face of climate change. As such, rural resources, workers, and localities need to be taken more seriously as a critical component of an interdependent national system.

Ann M. Eisenberg *

* Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law

Rural America, as has been well documented, faces many challenges. Businesses and people are migrating to more urban and suburban regions. The extraction and agricultural economies that once helped them thrive—mining, tobacco, textiles—are dying. And, as we discuss below, residents of rural communities tend to be older, poorer, less credentialed in terms of their education, less healthy, and declining in population.

On a regular basis, political leaders on both sides of the aisle, and on national and state levels, make commitments to rural areas to help improve the quality of life for residents, to listen, and to help. Even with all the attention, many challenges remain, leading policy makers to ask: How can we help our rural communities?

In this Article we try to answer that question by looking specifically at the Commonwealth of Virginia, a state whose rural residents suffer disproportionately worse life outcomes than their counterparts in other parts of the state. While it is true, as we will show, that state leaders have paid attention to these challenges, it is equally true that many of the challenges facing rural Virginians persist.

Andrew Block *

Antonella Nicholas **

* Associate Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

** JD Candidate, University of Virginia School of Law