Concern for shortage of rural lawyers exposes Ohio’s disproportionate white male rule

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Several weeks ago, State Rep. Brian Stewart lamented on social media that 75% of Ohio’s lawyers are concentrated in the six largest counties.

For many Ohioans, that fact oozes with unfairness. It suggests that people in rural communities aren’t receiving adequate legal representation.

Who wouldn’t sympathize, right? That is, until realizing that Stewart had just opened a barn door he didn’t intend to open – a conversation about equal representation – a door through which the people of Ohio can drive a John Deere 9RX 830 .

Stewart heard the 75% figure at an Ohio Bar Association meeting as Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy offered her thoughts on the practice of law in the state. Kennedy added that the remaining 25% of Ohio’s lawyers are left to represent 6.5 million people.

“In those (other) communities, crucial legal matters, from eviction to probating estates, remain unresolved due to the scarcity of legal resources,” she said.

Stewart could relate because he is a lawyer from the small town of Ashville, population 4,689, down the road a-piece from Columbus in Pickaway County. Stewart, a native of Chillicothe in the Appalachian foothills, added to his tweet : “I’m proud to be among the 25% (of attorneys) serving residents (in) the other 82 counties.”

It is indeed ironic that Stewart and Kennedy make the case for adequate legal representation in the courts while both facilitate rural white male Republican superpower in Ohio – at the expense of the 62% of Ohioans who live in 15 urban counties.

Kennedy was one of the justices in the minority in 2022 who said Ohio’s gerrymandered legislative districts were constitutional. And Stewart was the sponsor of a House joint resolution in 2023 that would have made it more difficult for voters to amend the constitution. Why would he do that? Because there were movements to amend the constitution to end egregious gerrymandering – threatening his power – and guarantee reproductive rights.

Flipping Stewart’s concern for rural people, let’s look at the power already wielded by rural state lawmakers – and in particular white men – in Ohio:

• Two-thirds of the laws passed by the 2023-24 legislature, as of mid-June, were sponsored by lawmakers living in non-urban counties. How many live in those rural counties? About 38% of the population. In other words, rural lawmakers are making laws for the majority (62%) of Ohioans who live in urban counties.
• Of those six largest counties that Stewart and Kennedy lamented had all the lawyers, not one law passed by this legislature was sponsored by a lawmaker from three of those six. Those counties are Cuyahoga, Lucas and Montgomery, where 1.6 million people live.
• The state budget – arguably the most significant legislation this session – plus the transportation budget, industrial commission budget and workers compensation budget were all sponsored by state Rep. Jay Edwards, a local football hero/real estate agent/lawmaker from Nelsonville, population 5,373, in Athens County, a county within the Appalachian Regional Commission, with 107,000 acres in farmland and, according to census data, 97% rural land use.
• Of the legislation signed into law this session, 85% was sponsored by white men, though they account for only 37% of the Ohio population (defined as non-Hispanic white in population data).
• All legislation passed so far was sponsored by white legislators.

This is not to say that white men from rural counties are bad, even though the biggest bribery scandal in Ohio history was led by a now-imprisoned white male farmer turned insurance agent turned House Speaker from an Appalachian county. (That scandal raised utility bills for Ohioans and some portions of the law remain in effect.)

There are life-and-death consequences to the actions of the legislature that far exceed the cost of electricity.

At a series of Akron community conversations in 2023 dealing with safety and policing, one participant in a highly diverse crowd asked, “Whose idea was it to allow open carry of guns?”

The answer to the Akron man’s question is: State Sen. Terry Johnson of Scioto County, at the southern tip of the state. Johnson is a doctor, retired Ohio National Guard colonel and former coroner in a county at the epicenter of Ohio’s deadly opioid crisis.

He served well the interests of his region by sponsoring and shepherding legislation directed at the overdose crisis, which included expanding the availability of naloxone, an overdose treatment. That helped urban counties as well.

But Johnson also sponsored the 2022 law that allowed most 21-year-olds to carry weapons without a permit or training – the same law that caused consternation in the Akron conversation about community safety. In early June, 28 people in Akron were victims in a mass shooting – one of them died.

Johnson is white and lives about four hours from Akron. His campaign website includes photos of bales of straw, a tractor, a child holding a gun and the Ohio River. His home county is part of the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Johnson’s gun bill didn’t move through the legislature undetected. To the contrary, there were 245 written or orally delivered testimonies during legislative hearings. That’s huge.

But only 17 of the 245 statements were in favor of the bill. That means that the other 228 testimonies – 93% of the total – were against the bill.

So how did that law get passed with such opposition, considering also that statewide polling showed overwhelming support for more stringent gun regulation, not less?

Here’s more information: 48 additional House members agreed to attach their names to Johnson’s bill as cosponsors, meaning it was sponsored by half of the members of the Ohio House of Representatives.

Of all the sponsors, 82% were men. Not one sponsor was Black. More importantly, 74% of the sponsors were not from the 15 counties identified by Ohio State University Extension Service as urban and where 62% of Ohioans live.

And here’s the real rub: Women accounted for 74% of the public opposition – 169 of the statements. They traveled from Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati to sometimes appear at multiple hearings. They told personal stories of grief and fears for children in schools, offered statistics, and two opponents were female urban sheriffs warning of dire consequences.

One cannot have this discussion without looking at the accumulated power of the Ohio Republican Party, so much so that Republican control of the legislature defies mathematical logic.

Consider these facts:

• Democrats outnumber Republicans in Ohio. According to the Secretary of State’s office, there are 1.8 million voters who have declared a party affiliation. Of those, 53% are Democrats, meaning they have a 6-point advantage over Republicans.
• But wait, you say. In 2020, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden 53%-45%, or by 8 points.
• Correct. But 70% of the seats in the Ohio Legislature are Republican. That’s a 40-point gap in favor of Republicans.

What’s more insidious is the structure that greases tone-deaf governance. Here’s who twists arms for votes and decides which legislation will live or die:

• Because Republicans have a supermajority, their legislative leadership is what matters. All of the 10 Republicans listed in leadership roles in both houses are white, though the state is 20% non-white.
• Of those 10 leaders, 80% are men, though 49% of the population is men. Should it be a surprise that the bottom job in each chamber falls to a woman? In the Senate, the woman is the whip, and in the House, where the whip is a male, there then is an assistant whip.
• 80% of the House and Senate standing committee chairmen are men. Committees are where bills are debated, rewritten and sent to the full house for final action. (This inventory was as of early June. Assignments sometimes change.)
• 43 of the 46 House and Senate committee chairs are white – 93%. There are no Black representatives or senators in any committee chair position.
• The two people who control each house are Senate President Matt Huffman, a white male lawyer from Lima in rural Allen County, and the Speaker of the House Jason Stephens, who owns a small farm in Getaway, an unincorporated hamlet deep in Appalachia.

If Ohioans haven’t been made aware of all of this, it’s time to think about supporting local journalism. The legislature doesn’t make this kind of analysis easy. A retired journalist living on Social Security and a pension spent weeks scraping websites, researching individual lawmakers, analyzing data, consulting with other journalists and leading community conversations for eight years to produce this report.

Circling back to Stewart and his call for adequate legal representation in the rural counties, let’s look at those six counties where he expressed concern that they had too many lawyers: Franklin, Cuyahoga, Hamilton, Summit, Montgomery and Lucas.

Only seven of the 46 standing legislative committee chairmen – 15% – come from those six counties, although they represent 42% of the population.

Franklin and Cuyahoga – Ohio’s two largest counties with 2.6 million people – together have elected representatives chairing only two committees, while Tuscarawas County, with population 92,500, by itself has two committee chairs. That’s 2.6 million urban residents with two committee chairs vs. 92,500 rural folks with two committee chairs.

There’s one more legislative action that deserves attention, and that’s the 2023 effort to make it harder for Ohioans to amend the state constitution. Why did the state legislature decide this was an issue so important that they created a special election in August – when many Ohioans were vacationing – to submit this to voters?

They saw what was coming: A citizen initiative to guarantee women’s health rights and another initiative to end gerrymandered super-majorities.

Polling showed Ohioans in favor of both measures, so Republicans set out to block those efforts.

Stewart led the effort in the House to change the constitution but failed. The Senate followed swiftly with a resolution sponsored by two rural lawyers: Rob McColley of Napoleon (population 8,860) and Theresa Gavarone, from the college town of Bowling Green, also in the agricultural flatlands of Northwest Ohio. Fifteen more senators became co-sponsors, meaning more than half the Senate attached their names to the bill.

Of the 17 names on the bill, 94% were white and 76% were men.

Then came the testimony. There were 117 submitted statements and testimonies at legislative hearings, 83% of which were in opposition. Of those in opposition, 60% were women.

The rural GOP effort led by white men – and lawyers – failed when it was submitted to voters.

Perhaps it’s true: Urban areas have a disproportionate number of lawyers. But maybe the urban counties need those lawyers because of the laws passed by rural white men.

What Stewart didn’t tweet back in May were these other facts available from the Ohio Bar Association:

• Black residents account for 13.3% of the adult population but only 4.3% of the state’s lawyers.
• Women account for 51% of the adult population but only 36% of the lawyers.

The traditional solution to this egregious corruption of democracy is to have more informed voters. What was learned in those Akron community conversations about safety and policing was more powerful than an occasional election. Instead, it built relationships, allowed people to share and respect life experiences and discover they have shared values. Those steps then energized the work of developing solutions.

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