Alaska Rural Justice

The Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission was created by Congress in 2004 to review the federal, state, and local jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters in Alaska. and to submit recommendations to Congress and the Alaska State Legislature regarding ways to improve the quality of justice in rural Alaska. Rural Alaska is defined in the legislation as those areas of Alaska outside the Municipality of Anchorage, the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the Kenai Peninsula Borough, the Juneau Borough and City, the Sitka Borough and the Ketchikan Borough.

As part of its on-going public education mission, the Justice Center compiled an annotated bibliography of books, articles, studies, reports, and other documents related to Alaska rural justice issues published from the early 1990s to early 2006. (Earlier years had been thoroughly covered in a previous rural justice bibliography published by the Alaska Judicial Council in 1991.) An early draft version of the bibliography was made available to the Alaska Rural Justice and Law Enforcement Commission in 2005; the completed bibliography was made available to the public in October 2006. Articles in the Alaska Justice Forum related to the work of the Commission were also published during this period.