Prof. Lisa Pruitt

speaker Prof. Lisa Pruitt

“ If you don’t have a lawyer or two ... in a place, then when there are systemic injustices occurring in that place, you don’t have a system of checks and balances. ”

Lisa Pruitt is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. She teaches torts, law and rural livelihoods, sociology of the legal profession, among other courses. Prior to joining the faculty, she worked abroad for almost a decade in settings ranging from international organizations to private practice. She worked with lawyers in more than 30 countries, negotiating cultural conflicts in various arenas, from intellectual property rights to rape as a war crime. Pruitt’s scholarly work focuses on rural places, examining the rural-urban difference in relation to how people engage law and state. She has looked at how rural areas are affected by abortion access, substance abuse, termination of parental rights, domestic violence, access to justice, health and human services, and indigent defense. She has authored countless journal articles published in Harvard Law and Policy Review, Journal of Rural Studies, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, UC Davis Law Review, among many others. Pruitt served on the California Commission on Access to Justice and the Rural Access Committee from 2015 to 2019 where she also served as chair from 2017 to 2020.

Talks by Prof. Lisa Pruitt