It is common for judicial policies and procedures – the rules and established steps for adjudicating criminal cases – to operate differently in a rural context compared with an urban or suburban context. Courtroom actors must tackle obstacles specific to rural communities, such as large geographical distances, fewer monetary resources due to a low tax base and deep social ties to the community, amongst others. As a result, courtroom policies and procedures may be more informal and less bureaucratic in nature.

Because of geographic barriers and slower disposition times owing to infrequent court sessions, many rural communities have altered the simple delivery of adjudication services. In the United States, in the state of New York, a justice court or a regionalized equivalent is available to hear all types of criminal and civil cases in each of the state’s 1,486 towns and villages with the goal of delivering justice to each constituent’s door. In Brazil, a country whose judiciary has been opposed owing to its large bureaucracy and slowness in delivering verdicts, there is a traveling riverboat that serves as a courtroom for the most remote residents. Similarly, through a grant with the United States Department of Justice, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe located in South Dakota was able to pilot a mobile courtroom.

In locations where mobile courts are not an option for overcoming large geographical barriers, rural courts may allow teleconferencing for court appearances. This is prevalent in rural Australian courts given the huge distances covered by many Australian jurisdictions. Using teleconferencing, courtroom actors can conduct various types of hearings, link incarcerated persons to courtrooms, obtain witness testimony or link magistrates to busier courts to assist in finalizing a court’s caseload. Teleconferencing has also been a proposed method of service delivery for rural courts in the United States.

To combat the obstacle of fewer resources, and potentially the inability to attract qualified personnel, judges in rural communities tend to have varying credentials and responsibilities (see Carroll, 2016). In the United States, 31 states do not require their judges to be admitted to the Bar and in 22 states non-lawyer judges may preside over misdemeanours that carry a jail sentence.