Law and Rural Livelihoods
Lisa Pruitt
UC Davis School of Law
The course will survey a broad range of legal subfields and expose you to historical and contemporary legal problems specific to rural communities in the United States by using legal, sociological, historical, and media sources. We will cover topics such as rural civil and criminal justice systems, as well as a number of legal issues, through the lens of rural difference and rural disadvantage: the Native American experience, immigration, racial inequality, education, health and human services, and environmental injustice, among others. In the process, we’ll consider changing legal definitions of the rural, think about how the topics we cover are intertwined, and reassess the place of rural communities in American law and policy.