Seminar - 3 hours. This seminar considers rural manifestations of various legal, social and economic phenomena. We will survey various subfields of legal study, e.g., criminal justice, poverty, environment and land use, local government, family, constitutional, agricultural, access to justice, as they relate to the rural-urban continuum. We will debate rurality as an aspect of identity and consider its intersections with race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and other identity variables.
Our multi-disciplinary approach will feature scholarly literature in law, rural sociology, geography, and other fields. Readings will also include reports from reputable media sources, and we will view and discuss excerpts from movie and television programs depicting rural people and places. We will consider various aspects of rural-urban difference, along with the challenges of getting law-makers and policy-makers to attend to these differences. All of these tools will be used to debate current events that have particular implications for rural people and places, e.g., Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, deaths of despair, abortion regulation, and work requirements for public benefits.
Please note: students who have already taken the White Working Class and the Law Seminar are not eligible to take this course.
Final Assessment: Other (Students may write a final paper or they may write for the course blog or in other formats).
Graduation Requirements: May meet Advanced Writing Requirement with the instructor's permission; Satisfies the Bias, Antiracism and Cultural-Competency requirement.
Classroom Policies: This course has a no-laptop policy.
Grading Mode: Letter grading.