Defining a canon of rural law

The heavyweight law blog, Prawfsblawg, is undertaking a grand project to define legal canons in a wide range of areas. I've asked my fellow contributors to the Jurisydnamics Network to join me in responding to the Prawfsblawg challenge by defining the canon in areas of interest to us, including agricultural law.

As we embark on this project, though, I wonder whether we might profitably reconsider how we ask the question. In the words of Suzanne Langer, one of the twentieth century's great philosophers on learning, how we pose a question often predisposes its answer. Perhaps it is time to think of a broader canon of rural law rather than strictly agricultural law.

I am taking a cue from the Francophone world. There the term droit rural includes but is not coextensive with agricultural law. The leading agricultural law journal is named La Revue de Droit Rural, and the European Council for Agricultural Law is better known by its French acronymn, CEDR: Comité Européen de Droit Rural.

Within American law, rural law might include the law of public lands, the battery of laws concerning subsidies for rural development (such as reclamation, rural electrification, and rural telephony), certain bodies of natural resources law, and perhaps even Indian law. Rural communities face unique legal challenges that are worthy of focused study and, most important for current purposes, are not adequately addressed within an industry-specific framework directed at an ever diminishing share of rural revenues, rural jobs, and rural culture.

The subject of rural law and its canon so defined might be supple enough, for instance, to embrace the following abstract:

The United States lags behind many other countries in wireless telephony despite its wealth and relatively high rural population. The answer to this conundrum may lie in the United States' commitment to cooperative federalism in the administration of subsidies for rural telephone service. ... Federal mechanisms for subsidizing rural telephony demonstrate the irreconcilable conflict between decentralization and deregulation. Insofar as state regulators are not prepared to complete the transition from traditional public utility regulation, they deserve no deference. Indeed, this article argues that there should be no deference whatsoever to interpretations of law and other exercises of discretion undertaken by state regulators charged with implementing federal telecommunications law.

This, of course, is a paper of mine -- namely, Subsidized Rural Telephony and the Public Interest -- but I feel no shame in suggesting that it addresses a question affecting rural life and public policy. Those objectives, of course, have always lain at the heart of agricultural law. Contemporary law has simply added to the list of tools, and targets, as rural life undergoes ever greater upheaval.