It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Lisa R. Pruitt (right) as today's guest blogger.Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law (Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall), Lisa's special interests include law and rural livelihoods, feminist jurisprudence, the legal profession, and torts. Her scholarship focuses on cultural differences; in particular, on the range of ways in which rural places are distinct from what has become the implicit urban norm in legal scholarship. Exposed through this research is how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales shape residents' lives, including their encounters the law. Most recently, as described more fully in her guest post below, Lisa has explored how rural spatiality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity; that is, the ways in which rural lives and rural places are enmeshed with law and other forces at both national and global levels.
These are issues that Lisa examines frequently on her Legal Ruralism blog (subtitle: "A Little (Legal) Realism about the Rural"), among the "connections" links in our righthand column.
Lisa earned a Ph.D. in Laws from the University of London, where she was a British Marshall Scholar and wrote a dissertation entitled "A Feminist Reconsideration of the Legal Regulation of Speech." She earned her J.D. and B.A. degrees, both with honors, from the University of Arkanas, Little Rock, where she served as the law review's Editor-in-Chief. She was a law clerk to Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, and a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands. Lisa's pre-academia career included service as a consultant to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, as a legal assistant at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, and as associate at Covington & Burling LLP, based in its London office.
Lisa is Chair-Elect of the Section on Women in Legal Education of the Association of American Law Schools. Among her honors is to have been selected for the 2002 Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum, where she presented her article No Black Names on the Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination in the South African Legal Profession.
Heartfelt welcome!
