Lisa Pruitt, Road to Ruralism
Lisa Pruitt (UC-Davis, Law) joined us on January 27th to open our inaugural Rural Law & Policy Seminar Series, with a talk entitled, Road to Ruralism. It was a thoughtful and entertaining discussion of her work and experience in bringing rural considerations to the forefront of law and policy. For decades, she has drawn attention to the important ways in which law has been written without considering its suitability to rural areas. Click below to view her talk.
bio
Lisa R. Pruitt is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law.
abstract
This talk offers ruminations on my decades-long effort to reveal the legal relevance of rurality and to deploy rurality as a critical lens on law and legal scholarship. Since 2000, I have worked to tease out, document and theorize rural difference and, in doing so, to reveal law’s increasingly urbanormative character. I have sought to draw the attention of legal scholars and judges to the distinct situation of rural people, including differences in how rural folks engage and are engaged by law, legal actors, and legal institutions. Exploring rural difference has inevitably led to many discoveries and discussions of rural disadvantage: in education, health and human services, the criminal justice system, and many other sectors. Over this same period, I have sought to draw the attention of rural sociologists and geographers to the realm of law and law’s power to shape lives.
This talk tracks the emergence of the sub-field I call Law and Rural Livelihoods, from my childhood in the Arkansas Ozarks to my attendance at the International Rural Sociological Association meeting in Rio de Janeiro two decades ago, up through the more recent (very positive) emergence of a cadre of legal scholars engaging rural issues and the (mostly negative) attention that rural folks increasingly draw on the national stage. Among other matters, I speculate on the future of this interdisciplinary scholarly community and what we can do to nurture this still nascent enterprise.
