Wisconsin Supreme Court Cites Professor Pruitt

The Wisconsin Supreme Court cited an article co-authored by Professor Lisa Pruitt in reversing a lower court ruling in Wisconsin v. Ramirez, in which an incarcerated man who stabbed a corrections officer objected to his trial not commencing until nearly four years later.

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals had sided with the incarcerated man, Luis Ramirez, but the Supreme Court held that his right to a speedy trial was not violated. The court acknowledged that northern Wisconsin’s lawyer shortage – examined in Pruitt’s 2018 Harvard Law and Policy Review article “Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice” – might have been a factor. But it was a systemic, and not intentional, factor.

Distinguished Professor of Law Lisa R. Pruitt is a Brigitte Bodenheimer Research Scholar whose recent work explores the legal relevance of rural spatiality, including how it inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity. Pruitt's work also considers rural-urban difference in transnational and international contexts. She is the recipient of the law school’s 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award.