June 26, 2010
Taking Rural People Seriously. Not.
Written by Lisa R. Pruitt
I started writing about rural people and places in relation to the law a few years ago, motivated in part by their near total absence from legal scholarship. I grew up in a very rural corner of Arkansas, where most of my family of origin still lives, and it struck me that lives like theirs (and formerly mine) were largely unseen and unacknowledged by legal actors at scales other than the most local (and sometimes even by those, e.g, the Sheriff).
Rural residents comprise nearly 20% of our nation's population,but they are a forgotten fifth whose lives are in many ways different to what has become a presumptive but rarely expressed urban norm in legal scholarship. (Fellow blogger Katie Porter's work on bankruptcy in rural contexts is an important exception).
Parthenon General Store in Parthenon, Arkansas, which is not a census designated place; a town with a post office but with no wikipedia entry.
I started studying the legal relevance of rurality about a decade ago, and I have found so much to say that I have published only within the sub-discipline I call "law and rural livelihoods" since 2006. I expect to spend the rest of my career exploring rural people as legal subjects and rural places as context, even if it means writing my way into the very obscurity associated with rurality itself.
It is not surprising, then, that as a consumer of legal scholarship I find myself looking for rural people, for acknowledgment of rural difference, rural context, rural society. Of course, rural-urban difference is not relevant to every legal issue or every piece of legal scholarship, but from time to time I come across a law review article that seems to cry out for some acknowledgment of rurality. That happened last week when I saw on ssrn.com an essay by Jonas Lerman titled "Food Fights and Food Rights: Legislating the 'Delicious Revolution.'" Lerman's abstract states in part:
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