The Rabbit Hole: Taking on the Courts, Alone.

Editor’s Note: Between the executive orders targeting law firms for their perceived lack of fidelity to one political side and, conversely, the more than 600 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration, attorneys are on the front line of the partisan divide. However, outside of the bare-knuckle legal fights that will in many ways shape the future of our country, there exists another space. A place where people cannot afford $3,4000 hourly rates at top-tier law firms and in some cases can’t find a lawyer to hire, even if they could swing the price. While there has been much discussion on the concentration of wealth in the United States to an increasingly smaller number of people, that same worry could be readily applied to the legal field. Every day in federal courts around the country, there are small legal battles waged by those who can’t afford the fancy law firms, whose concerns may not result in wholesale public policy changes but have the power to dramatically improve at least one person’s life. These cases don’t rise to the level of a team of fly-in Big Law pro bono lawyers or billionaires bankrolling lawsuits, and they don’t immediately present as civil cases that make the front pages. Representing yourself is a lonely but occasionally noble endeavor. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Peter Beck examines the rise of legal deserts in America, what happens when you take your concerns on your own to the U.S. Courts, and the innumerable ways the deck is stacked against you. -Seamus

The courts are an exclusive bunch. To even begin practicing law, a person must have graduated from college, attended law school for at least three years, and then pass the infamous Bar exam, before taking an ethics test and going through a rigorous “character and fitness” screening process. There’s some purpose behind these high barriers to entry: The daily work of an attorney, whether it be filing motions, working with clients, or arguing in court, needs training. A nonlawyer observing court might feel that the attorneys and judges are speaking a different language.

But what happens when lawyers aren’t around, or when people feel compelled to take matters into their own hands? In rural areas across the United States, legal deserts are growing, and, in a country where slightly more than one in four low-income citizens trust the legal system, their prevalence will have significant consequences for the public’s faith in the rule of law. One indication of these growing legal deserts is in the federal docket itself: so-called pro se cases in which litigants attempt, oftentimes unsuccessfully, to represent themselves in court. 

Whether it be in the form of nursing home deaths, inadequate disability accommodations on public transportation, neighborhood feuds on Facebook, deplorable prison conditions, or the “selective enforcement” of sidewalk regulations, pro se cases are a window into both the policy problems plaguing everyday Americans and the more bewildering side of the legal system. And they’re incredibly under-discussed, despite taking up a significant chunk of the docket and judges’ time: In 2021 and 2020, the two most recent years for which data are publicly available, pro se cases accounted for 29.2 percent and 25.8 percent of docketed federal court cases.

Filing a pro se petition, however, is a remarkable step for someone to take, putting in the time, effort, thought, money, and confidence to challenge someone in court on their own. Some federal courts offer forms to pro se litigants in which they can list their alleged harm, the factual circumstances, damages requested, the specific laws reportedly violated, and the defendants they wish to sue, but that requires research on the law and how to write out a claim and allegations that a court will accept. 

Confusing rules, even over something as simple as which defendants to sue in civil rights cases, can doom a petition. Then, to actually file a petition, a pro se litigant has to pay a roughly $400 fee, unless a judge specifically orders that the litigant is unable to afford it. Even then, people who represent themselves pro se are responsible for keeping up with court notices and schedules, which can seem like a simple task at first before being thrown into the mix of daily life.

To be sure, some pro se cases are, to put it bluntly, nutty. There are instances in which pro se plaintiffs were able to get in touch with an attorney, only for the lawyer to realize that the plaintiff’s claims were either devoid of a factual reality or did not have a legitimate legal argument. One out of many examples of this is the several pro se cases suing “Satan” (“a.k.a Lucifer da Fallen Loser”) in federal court. It seems unlikely, however, that all or the majority of the 20,878 pro se cases filed in federal appellate courts in 2025 can be attributed to someone struggling with mental health problems.

Inaccess to counsel—whether because a litigant lacks the financial means to hire an attorney or simply can’t get to one—accounts for many pro se cases. The latter problem is a growing one amid the widening urban-to-rural divide: According to the American Bar Association, 40 percent of counties in the United States—out of 3,144 overall—qualify as legal deserts, where less than a single attorney practices per 1,000 residents. 

Such is the case in South Carolina, where one woman—representing herself—filed a civil suit against a rural city council, alleging that council members had violated the council’s rules of order and failed to disclose information under the Freedom of Information Act. And in rural Missouri, where one congressional hopeful sued the state’s Republican party and secretary of state by himself over being rejected from participating in the Republican primary because of “purity tests,” citing several prominent Republicans’ flips to the GOP from Democrats. There’s a noticeable trend of pro se cases emerging from legal deserts, which frequently cover rural communities in the United States.

Almost 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas. Yet only 2 percent of small law firms are located there. In practice, this means that in places like California, 96 percent of the state’s 192,226 attorneys live in Urban areas, compared to 3 percent (7,333) who live in rural areas, and just 324 lawyers who have “frontier” addresses, for locations in which meeting a local attorney is a rare experience. 87 percent of California’s 39.2 million population lives in urban areas, with 12.35 percent (4.7 million) in rural parts, and less than a percent (252,378) of people living in frontier zones. This means the ratio of attorneys to residents goes from 1:175 in urban areas to 1:626 in rural areas and 1:738 in frontier areas. 

The data doesn’t just indicate disparities in blue states, either. In South Carolina, 65.2 percent of the state’s attorneys work in either Charleston, Greenville, or Richland counties. Just 397 lawyers, or 5.4 percent, work in rural counties, despite roughly a third of the state’s residents living there. Not only is this a persistent problem, but it’s also a growing one: Researchers have found that more attorneys are moving out of rural areas than in. Gone are the days of Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird, who was willing to take on cases from grandmothers in exchange for turnip greens and knew his clients long before they ever needed a lawyer. The small town lawyers are moving away or simply not coming back home after law school.

For the attorneys who do live in these areas, demands on their time are high. In Washington, the state contracted a firm in 2024 to handle 225 misdemeanor and felony cases for the year, despite the firm only having two attorneys on staff. In another Washington county, a single attorney was paid $66,000 by the state to handle up to 40 felony cases in a year. Those numbers appear large until they’re compared with the caseloads of rural public defenders. In 2023, researchers at the RAND Corporation documented a public defender serving two entire rural counties by themselves, with 265 open cases. Another attorney who was the sole public defender for a rural county in the Southwest had 300 open cases.

One way that sucks up these attorneys’ time, and perhaps makes practicing in rural areas less desirable, is time spent in the car.