Law and Rural Livelihoods
Lisa Pruitt
UC Davis School of Law
This course is for those curious about the place of “the rural” in American law, society and politics. Perhaps you noticed the buzz and backlash surrounding books like Vice President JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and the movie based on it. Maybe you’ve read about the opioid epidemic in rural communities or are interested in how rural criminal justice systems differ from the implicit urban norm. Maybe the widespread association of Trump’s rise with rural voters has drawn your attention to rural people and their concerns. Perhaps, you are from California’s Central Valley, a sparsely populated part of the Inland Empire, the Eastern or Northern Sierra, the would-be State of Jefferson, or another place that is rural by some measure. This course will push you to think seriously about how law and the relative absence of legal actors (e.g., law enforcement, lawyers, courts, state services) shape rural communities, as well as how rural geography in turn shapes legal and policy implementation.
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.