Lisa R. Pruitt
Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law
Education
B.A. Journalism, University of Arkansas 1986
J.D., University of Arkansas 1989
Ph.D. Laws, University of London 1997
Biography
Professor Lisa Pruitt's career spans the globe, literally and figuratively. Before joining the UC Davis law faculty in 1999, she worked abroad for almost a decade in settings ranging from international organizations to private practice. Pruitt worked with lawyers in more than 30 countries, negotiating cultural conflicts in several arenas. It is not surprising that a common theme of her research interests is how law and legal institutions manage and respond to cultural difference and cultural change.
Pruitt's recent scholarship is still about cultural difference, but the context is closer to home. She now writes about the intersection of law with rural livelihoods, thus bringing her focus to that which is popularly perceived as quintessentially local. Her work considers a range of ways in which rural places are distinct from what has become the implicit urban norm in legal scholarship. Pruitt reveals, for example, how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. Her most recent work considers how rural spatiality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity. In it, Pruitt challenges the association of the rural with the local by revealing the ways in which rural lives and rural places are enmeshed with national and global forces including legal ones.
Subject Areas
Law and Rural Livelihoods, Feminist Jurisprudence, Legal Profession, TortsSelected Career Highlights
- Vice President, Rural Sociological Society, 2017-18
- Distinguished Visitor, University of Southern Queensland, 2012
- AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, Chair, 2010
- Distinguished Teaching Award Nominee 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013
- Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum (2002) for "No Black Names on the Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination and the South African Legal Profession"
- AALS Section on Africa, Chair, 2005
- Associate, Covington & Burling, London, United Kingdom 1996-98
- Gender Consultant, International Criminal Tribunal, Kigali, Rwanda 1996
- Legal Assistant to George H. Aldrich, Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, The Hague, The Netherlands, 1993-95
- Law Clerk to Hon. Morris Sheppard Arnold, U.S. Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, 1992-93.
- British Marshall Scholar, 1989-92
In the News
Selected Publications
“What Hillbilly Elegy Teaches Us about Race in 21st Century America,” in Not Much Use to the Living: Appalachian Reflections on Hillbilly Elegy, Region and Identity (Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds) West Virginia University Press (forthcoming 2019).
To Recognize the Tyranny of Distance: A Spatial Reading of Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space (forthcoming 2018) (co-authored with Michele Statz).
Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice, 12 Harvard Law and Policy Review (forthcoming summer 2018) (co-authored with Danielle M. Conway, Hannah Haksgaard, Amanda Kool, Lauren Sudeall Lucas and Michele Statz).
The Women Feminism Forgot: Rural and White Working Class Women in the Era of Trump, Toledo Law Review (forthcoming 2018) (keynote address for symposium "Gender Equality: Progress and Possibilities").
A Case Study in Rural Community Economic Development: Hill Country Health & Wellness Center 26 Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law 73 (2017).
Protecting People, Protecting Places: What Environmental Litigation Conceals and Reveals about Rurality, 47 Journal of Rural Studies 326-36 (2016) (co-authored with Linda T. Sobczynski) (special issue on Rural Dimensions of Environmental Injustice).
Welfare Queens and White Trash, 25 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 289 (2016) (“Reframing the Welfare Queen” symposium).
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, in U.S. Feminist Judgments: Re-written Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Kathryn Stanchi et al. eds, Cambridge University Press 2016) (volume collecting feminist re-writes of germinal U.S. Supreme Court decisions about gender and women).
The False Choice Between Race and Class and Other Affirmative Action Myths, 63 Buffalo Law Review 981 (2015)
Justice in the Hinterlands: Arkansas As a Case Study for the Rural Lawyer Shortage and Evidence-Based Solutions to Alleviate It, 37 Univ. of Arkansas Little Rock Law Journal 573 (2015) (co-authored with J. Cliff McKinney and Bart Calhoun) (Access to Justice Symposium).
Who's Afraid of White Class Migrants? On Denial, Discrediting and Disdain (and Toward a Richer Conception of Diversity) 31 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 196 (2015)
Urbanormativity, Spatial Privilege, and Judicial Blind Spots in Abortion Law, 30 Berkeley Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 76 (2015) (co-authored with Marta R. Vanegas)
Law Stretched Thin: Access to Justice in Rural America, 59 South Dakota Law Review 466 (2014) (co-authored with Bradley E. Showman) (Project Rural Practice Symposium)
Acting White? Or Acting Affluent? A Book Review of Carbado & Gulati's Acting White? Rethinking Race in 'Post Racial' America, 18 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 159 (2015)
The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space, in The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography, (Nicholas Blomley, Irus Braverman, David Delaney, and Sandy Kedar, eds.; Stanford University Press 2014)
CEDAW and Rural Development: Empowering Women with Law from the Top Down, Activism from the Bottom Up, 41 Baltimore Law Review 263 (2012) (co-authored with Marta R. Vanegas) ("Applying Feminism Globally" symposium).
Judging Parents, Judging Place: Poverty, Rurality and Termination of Parental Rights, 77 Missouri Law Review 95 (2012) (co-authored with Janet L. Wallace)
The Geography of the Class Culture Wars, 34 Seattle University Law Review 767 (2011) (Colloquy about Joan Williams, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter, 2010)
Human Rights and Development for India's Rural Remnant: A Capabilities-Based Assessment, 44 UC Davis Law Review 803 (2011) (Symposium on "The Asian Century?")
Deconstructing CEDAW's Article 14: Naming and Explaining Rural Difference, 17 William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law 347 (2011) (invited)
Justice Deserts: Spatial Inequality and Local Funding of Indigent Defense, 52 Arizona Law Review 219 (2010) ("Funding Justice" symposium) (co-authored with Beth A. Colgan)
How You Gonna' Keep Her Down on the Farm ..., 78 University of Missoure at Kansas City Law Review 1085 (2010) ("One-L Revisited" Issue)
Spatial Inequality as Constitutional Infirmity: Equal Protection, Child Poverty and Place, 71 Montana Law Review 1 (2010) (“Rural Law” symposium)
Migration, Development and the Promise of CEDAW for Rural Women, 30 Michigan Journal of International Law 707 (2009) (“Territory without Boundaries” symposium)
Latina/os, Locality and Law in the Rural South, 12 Harvard Latino Law Review 135 (2009)
The Forgotten Fifth: Rural Youth and Substance Abuse, 20 Stanford Law and Policy Review 359 (2009) (symposium on drug policy)
Gender, Geography & Rural Justice, 23 Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice 338 (2008)
Place Matters: Domestic Violence and Rural Difference, 23 Wisconsn Journal of Law, Gender and Society 347 (2008) (symposium celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project)
Rural Families and Work-Family Issues, Sloan Work and Family Encycolopedia (2008)
Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural, 2007 Utah Law Review 421
Missing the Mark: Welfare Reform and Rural Poverty, 10 Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 439 (2007) (symposium on welfare reform)
Rural Rhetoric, 39 Connecticut Law Review 159 (2006)
A Kinder, Gentler Law School? Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Legal Education at King Hall, 38 UC Davis Law Review 1209 (2005) (co-authored with Celestial S.D. Cassman)
Her Own Good Name: Two Centuries of Talk about Chastity, 63 Maryland Law Review 401 (2004)
"On the Chastity of Women All Property in the World Depends": Injury from Sexual Slander in the Nineteenth Century, 78 Indiana Law Journal 965 (2003)
No Black Names on the Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination and the South African Legal Profession, 23 Michigan Journal of International Law 545 (2002)
Law Review Story, 50 Arkansas Law Review 77 (1997)
Contributing Editor, Yearbook of Commercial Arbitration, Volume XX (1995); Volume XXI (1996)
A Survey of Feminist Jurisprudence, 16 University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review 183 (1994)
Privacy Jurisprudence of the Press Complaints Commission, 1994 Anglo-American Law Review 133 (co-authored).
Gender & Bureaucracy, 3 Business Ethics: A European Journal 71 (1994).
The Law of Defamation: An Arkansas Primer, 42 Arkansas Law Review 915 (1989).
Service Activities
California Commission on Access to Justice (2015-18); Rural Task Force Co-Chair
Member, Poverty and Geography Network (multi-disciplinary network established by the National Poverty Research Center at the Institute for Research on Poverty), 2017-22
Rural Sociological Society, Vice President, 2017-18; Council Member, 2014-2016; former chair or co-chair of Research Interest Groups (RIGs) on Gender (2010-2011, 2013-2014); Rural Policy (2009-2011); and Rural Studies (2008-09, 2012-13)
UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, Executive Committee, 2012-2013; Director of Undergraduate Research Assistant Program, 2013, 2014; Organizer, Poverty and Place Conference, 2014
Advisory Committee, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education - Honors (2013-2014)
Search Advisory Committee, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education - Honors (2013)
AALS Mid-Year Meeting, Women Rethinking Equality, Planning Committee, 2010-2011
AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, Chair, 2010
No Glass Ceiling Task Force, Sacramento Bar Association, 2005-2007
AALS Section on Africa, Chair, 2005
Projects
Life and Law in Rural America: Cows, Cars and Criminals, Princeton University, March 25-26, 2016
Faculty, UC Davis University Honors Program
"The Uncondemned," a documentary film about the first conviction of rape as a war crime, the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu. Theatrical release: October, 2016
UC Davis Center for Poverty Research's Poverty and Place Conference