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Publications
Publications (36)
Distance—physical, material distance—is an obviously spatial concept, but one rarely engaged by legal or feminist geographers. We take up this oversight in relation to the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which adjudicated the constitutionality of a Texas law that imposed new regulations on abortion providers...
This paper considers how conservation litigation seeking to protect wilderness from degradation can overlook those living nearby or within it, even though the degradation also threatens residents. We use as a case study the controversial siting of a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) in a chronically impoverished, all-white community in t...
This chapter theorizes the significance of rural spatiality in relation to law and legal processes by exploring the mutually constitutive dynamic between law and spatiality in contemporary rural contexts. It posits that law and rural spatiality are in tension because the presence of law as an ordering force is at odds with the sociospatial characte...
Acting White? Rethinking Race in “Post-Racial” America (2013) is the latest installment in Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati’s decade-plus collaboration regarding issues of race and employment. This review lauds the book’s comprehensive treatment of the double bind that racial minorities — especially blacks — experience within principally white institu...
A fundamental tenet of legal geographies scholarship is that the legal and the spatial are mutually constituting. This chapter investigates that dynamic in contemporary rural contexts in the United States. In particular, I posit that law and rural spatiality are at odds with one another because the presence of law as an ordering, governing, regulat...
This is a contribution to a collection of reflections by former chairs of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education. The collection begins with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's reflections on her year as chair in 1972 and continues through Danne L. Johnson's reflections from 2011. Professor Pruitt was Chair of the Section in 2010.
Since the earliest days of U.S. legal history, women have sought legal redress for statements about their sexual behavior or otherwise about them as sexual beings. These female plaintiffs have typically employed defamation law to sue on the basis of communications that undermined their reputations for sexual propriety, which the law referred to as...
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is one of the most widely ratified human rights treaties in history, yet many view it as a failure in terms of what it has achieved for women. In spite of the lack of a meaningful enforcement mechanism and various other shortcomings, however, CEDAW has inspired f...
Parents are judged constantly, by fellow parents and by wider society. But the consequences of judging parents may extend beyond community reputation and social status. One of the harshest potential consequences is the state’s termination of parental rights. In such legal contexts, the state assesses parents’ merits as parents in relation to a wide...
This Essay is a contribution to a colloquy about Joan C. Williams’s book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter (Harvard University Press 2010). Williams argues that class matters because socially conscious progressives need working class allies to achieve work-family reform for the benefit of all. Williams calls us not only to...
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is the first human rights instrument to recognize explicitly rural-urban difference. It does so by enumerating specific rights for rural women in Article 14 and also by mentioning their needs in relation to Article 10 on education. In this Essay, I examine the Co...
The cachet that India currently enjoys on the world stage is linked largely to the booming high-tech and service economies associated with its megacities. Yet in terms of sheer numbers, India is not an urban nation. About a third of India’s population lives in urban areas, though that figure is rising quickly. One projection indicates that thirty-o...
© Lisa R. Pruitt 2010 This is a contribution to a collection of autobiographical essays, "One-L Revisited," in which authors reflect on their experiences as first-year law students. The author of this essay recounts her experiences at the University of Arkansas School of Law (1986-87). She frames her recollections primarily in relation to her rural...
This is the first in a series of articles that maps legal conceptions of (in)equality onto the socio-geographical concept of spatial inequality, with a view to generating legal remedies for those living in places marked by socioeconomic disadvantage. Written for a symposium on "rural law," this article considers in particular whether the funding an...
This Article explores the potential of international development efforts and human rights law to enhance the livelihoods of rural women in the developing world. In particular, the Article takes up the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which enumerates in Article 14 specific rights for rural women as...
This Article seeks to raise the visibility of the roughly twenty percent of the U.S. population who live in rural places—an often forgotten fifth—in relation to the particular challenges presented by adolescent substance abuse. Despite popular notions that substance abuse is essentially an urban phenomenon, recent data demonstrate that it is also a...
This Article considers the phenomenon of domestic violence in relation to the rural-urban axis. Written for a symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at the University of Wisconsin, it assesses the difference that rurality makes to the occurrence, investigation, prosecution, and judicial decision-making...
This essay, an entry for the on-line Sloan Work and Family Encyclopedia, provides an overview of work-family challenges in the context of rural America. Among the issues addressed are lack of economic diversification and opportunity; deficits in human capital; the dearth of childcare, transportation and other services that facilitate employment; an...
In this era of municipal anti-immigrant ordinances and federal-local cooperation to enforce immigration laws, legal issues associated with immigration are playing out at multiple scales, from the national down to the local. Legal actors at the municipal, county, and state levels have become front-line policymakers and law enforcers in relation to i...
Like other legal scholars, feminists often think about social change over time, using history as a lens to reveal disadvantage and injustice. They have demonstrated, for example, that the public/private divide and related separate spheres ideology are socially contingent developments based on evolving perceptions of women and gender roles. Shifts i...
Feminists have often criticized law's ignorance of women's practical, lived experiences, even as they have also sought to reveal the variety among those experiences. This article builds on both critiques to argue for greater attentiveness to a neglected aspect of women's situation: place. Specifically, Professor Pruitt asserts that the hardships an...
In this Article, Professor Pruitt discusses conceptions of the injury associated with defamation law, focusing in particular on sexual slander cases that were brought in the early nineteenth century, before statements that impugned a woman's chastity were deemed slander per se. During this time, women had to prove so-called "special damages" in ord...
In this Article, Professor Pruitt discusses conceptions of the injury associated with defamation law, focusing in particular on sexual slander cases that were brought in the early nineteenth century, before statements that impugned a woman's chastity were deemed slander per se. During this time, women had to prove so-called "special damages" in ord...
This essay is the story of the author's election as editor-in-chief of the Arkansas Law Review and of her tenure in that role. The story implicates a range of legal issues including hate speech, sexual harassment, sex discrimination, defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. It is also the tale of the author's feminist epiphany...
Mike Savage & Anne Witz, eds., Gender and Bureaucracy, Blackwells, Oxford, 1992, pp. 282, pb, £13.99, ISBN: 0631-85283.
This article, written for a symposium assessing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) a decade after its passage, considers welfare reform’s impact in rural America. Professor Pruitt asserts that federal welfare reform legislation reflects an urban political agenda that failed to consider rural realities. Base...
This essay articulates a relatively early taxonomy of the various strands of feminist legal theory. Its reach is transnational, including references to works by some European and Australian scholars.
© Lisa R. Pruitt & Beth A. Colgan 2010 This Article, written for a symposium on "Funding Justice," maps legal conceptions of (in)equality onto the socio-geographic conception of spatial inequality in relation to indigent defense services in Arizona. In particular, we examine county-to-county variations in funding and structures for providing this c...
This Article investigates law’s constitutive rhetoric about rural people, places, and livelihoods. Specifically, it considers five categories of judicial opinions that discuss the legal relevance of rurality: judicial self-identification as rural; definitions of rural; line-drawing between rural and urban; taking judicial notice of rural characteri...
Diversity is touted as a preeminent concern and important goal of the legal profession generally and of the UC Davis School of Law specifically. Known as King Hall (after Martin Luther King, Jr.), the UC Davis School of Law is relatively diverse compared to other law schools and enjoys a reputation as a kinder, gentler place to study law. This arti...
Although there have long been black lawyers in South Africa, during apartheid only a handful joined the ranks of the country’s large commercial firms. Now, in the post-apartheid period, these firms are keenly aware of a range of economic and political incentives to hire black attorneys, and most are doing so at a record pace. Very few black attorne...