Faculty Feature: Professor Lisa R. Pruitt

Professor Lisa R. Pruitt’s career has stretched from early international work on cultural conflict to exploring how rurality affects people’s engagement with law and the state. She is now a leading expert on rural law and justice.

Early in her career, Professor Pruitt worked abroad for nearly a decade, with lawyers in more than 30 countries. While her cultural conflict work was wide-ranging, one memo she wrote about the Rwandan genocide made history. Prosecutors used it to obtain the first conviction of sexual assault as a war crime. The 2016 film The Uncondemned documents the case and Professor Pruitt’s contribution.

After earning tenure in 2004, Professor Pruitt established a new sub-discipline in legal scholarship, exploring rural-urban differences. Her central premise was that law and legal scholarship had become metro-centric. She has brought a ruralist lens to such topics as abortion access, substance abuse, termination of parental rights, domestic violence, access to justice, health and human services, and indigent defense. Recently, she has explored critical whiteness studies as a thread of critical race theory. While challenging the conflation of rurality with whiteness, her work seeks a more nuanced understanding of rural and working-class whites.

Professor Pruitt has both a B.A. in Journalism and a J.D. from the University of Arkansas, as well as a Ph.D. in Laws from the University of London. She is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research Executive Committee. She is President Elect of the Rural Sociological Society, from which she received the 2021 Excellence in Research Award. She received King Hall’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020.

What do you wish more people understood about rural communities?

I wish people had a more profound understanding of the integral connection and interdependence between rural and urban. Rural scholars often speak in terms of food, fuel, and fiber—three categories of goods we get from rural places, but, of course, we depend on rural communities for a wide range of products we take for granted including, very recently, lithium for batteries to power our devices and our vehicles. A recent study revealed logging to be the most dangerous occupation in the country—and it’s an occupation associated with rural economies and the timber we use for myriad purposes. We should respect this work and the people who do it.

I also wish people knew that rural America is more racially and ethnically diverse than they tend to assume. In the 2010 Census, one in five rural residents was a person of color. By 2020, that had risen to one in four. 

What impact do you think your early work on rape as a war crime has had on how those crimes are treated now?

That work helped to establish the precedent that rape can be successfully prosecuted as a war crime, though the potential for those prosecutions was long-standing by the time the Akayesu case was decided. Of course, prosecutions of war crimes remain very rare for several reasons, not least the barriers to arresting those who are charged and the challenge of garnering the cooperation of witnesses, perhaps especially victims of sexual assaults. 

So, that early work on rape as a war crime is symbolically important—and it was, of course, important to the women who were raped during the Rwandan genocide. Yet, as a practical matter, it has meant less than we had hoped in terms of what courts and tribunals have since been able to accomplish in the context of other conflicts. 

What originally drew you to the law?

It seems odd on reflection that my family joked about me becoming a lawyer simply because I liked to argue. I was an excellent hair splitter. What’s odd about them thinking that might make me a lawyer is that none of us really knew what lawyers did. I grew up in a working-class family—my mother was a teacher’s aide, and my father was a long-distance truck driver. We didn’t know any lawyers. There was just one lawyer in my hometown. So, our perception of lawyers was shaped simply by television programs.

Nevertheless, law became my aspiration, in part because my mother’s nickname for me was “last-word Lisa”—reflecting my penchant for arguing. In college, as a journalism major, I honed my writing and speaking skills. As I was finishing my B.A., I realized I didn’t have the personality to be a journalist (though I think I have since developed that personality). Plus, journalists weren’t earning much in Arkansas—maybe not enough for me to make student loan payments and meet living expenses—so I went ahead and took the law school plunge. 

I perceived that law was a tool for “doing good,” though I understood none of the specifics about what that looked like. I just thought law could be used to empower people, to right wrongs. Like lots of law students today, I wanted to be a social justice warrior, though we didn’t speak in those terms back in the 1980s—at least not in my corner of the world. 

Did you always plan to end up in academia?

There’s an expectation that smart rural girls will become teachers—and implicit in that is that those rural women will return home to teach in their communities of origin. I was in that mold in that I was always drawn to teaching—and I am a huge admirer of educators at all levels. But I was generally too ambitious to return home and teach high school—so I studied journalism instead of English, thinking I would have more options with a journalism degree. 

In the end, though, once I was in law school, I knew I wanted to teach law school. I loved parsing the finer points of law and distinguishing cases. I still loved splitting hairs. I was still “last-word Lisa.” So, I was best suited to appellate litigation or academia. It took me a while to launder my non-elite law degree—I spent a decade getting a Ph.D., clerking for a federal judge, practicing law, working for international organizations. Eventually I was able to get a job as a professor at a great law school: UC Davis! 

What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Not much. I’m a transparent person, so my students already know a lot about me. When my torts students came to a potluck at my home this fall, they were already familiar with various perils I’d used in hypos, e.g., my neighbor’s precarious, looming eucalyptus trees, the creek bed that every member of my family has accidentally biked or fallen into. They seemed to get a kick out of seeing these things for themselves.

My students know I like to hike and that I have a new e-bike. They also know I have a creaky left knee because I often wince while pacing during class, when it feels like the knee is going to give way.

But if you’re looking for something that will surprise because it’s out of character with who I am now: I was a high school cheerleader. 

What do you most enjoy about teaching? What do you hope students gain from your courses?

The students are the best part of teaching, of course. I enjoy getting to know them, their stories, their aspirations. Students are a source of enormous inspiration. Many of them make huge sacrifices and take big risks to follow their dreams to law school. This is one reason I love teaching a seminar I created for first-gen students. Students in that course are invited to bring their whole selves into the class and to see their stories, their journeys to law school as strengths, as sources of power. It’s also an exercise in gratitude because we think not only in terms of the obstacles, but also in terms of the mentors, friends, and family who have helped us achieve our goals.

Of what are you proudest?

This seems like a trick question. I guess it’s an invitation to humble brag. I’m very proud of my family—my husband and my son. 

Professionally, I’m proud of all the varied and extraordinary careers my former students—over 25+ years of teaching—are enjoying. I’m so excited about what they are accomplishing. I am also proud to have retained so many former students as dear friends. Nothing lights up my day like having a former student get in touch and give me a professional or personal update. 

Do you have one piece of advice for King Hall law students?

There is no substitute for doing the work, learning this new language you must learn to “do law.” In torts, read the cases. It’s all there in the cases. Let the cases be your friend.

View past Faculty Features here.