Professor Lisa Pruitt’s career spans the globe, literally and figuratively. Before joining the UC Davis law faculty in 1999, she worked abroad for almost a decade in settings ranging from international organizations to private practice. Pruitt worked with lawyers in more than 30 countries, negotiating cultural conflicts in several arenas. It is not surprising that a common theme of her research interests is how law and legal institutions manage and respond to cultural difference and cultural change.

Pruitt’s recent scholarship is still about cultural difference, but the context is closer to home. She now writes about the intersection of law with rural livelihoods, thus bringing her focus to that which is popularly perceived as quintessentially local. Her work considers a range of ways in which rural places are distinct from what has become the implicit urban norm in legal scholarship. Pruitt reveals, for example, how the economic, spatial, and social features of rural locales profoundly shape the lives of residents, including the junctures at which they encounter the law. Her most recent work considers how rural spatiality inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity. In it, Pruitt challenges the association of the rural with the local by revealing the ways in which rural lives and rural places are enmeshed with national and global forces—including legal ones.
Distinguished Teaching Award Nominee 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008

AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, Executive Committee, 2008

AALS Section on Africa, Chair, 2005

Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum (2002) for "No Black Names on the Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination and the South African Legal Profession"

Associate, Covington & Burling, London, United Kingdom 1996-98

Gender Consultant, International Criminal Tribunal, Kigali, Rwanda 1996

Legal Assistant to George H. Aldrich, Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, The Hague, The Netherlands, 1993-95

Law Clerk to Hon. Morris Sheppard Arnold, U.S. Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, 1992-93.

British Marshall Scholar, 1989-92
B.A. Journalism, University of Arkansas, 1986

J.D. University of Arkansas, 1989

Ph.D. University of London, 1997
Feminist Legal Theory, Law and Rural Livelihoods, Torts, and Legal Profession

"Rural Families," Sloan Work and Family Encyclopedia (forthcoming 2008)

Gender, Geography & Rural Justice (forthcoming 2008)

Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural, 2007 Utah Law Review 421

Missing the Mark: Welfare Reform and Rural Poverty, 10 Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 439 (2007)

Rural Rhetoric, 39 Connecticut Law Review 159 (2006)

A Kinder, Gentler Law School? Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Legal Education at King Hall, 38 University of California Davis Law Review 1209 (2005) (co-authored with Celestial S.D. Cassman)

Her Own Good Name: Two Centuries of Talk about Chastity, 63 Maryland Law Review 401 (2004) Read

"On the Chastity of Women All Property in the World Depends": Injury from Sexual Slander in the Nineteenth Century, 78 Indiana Law Journal 965 (2003) Read

No Black Names on the Letterhead? Efficient Discrimination and the South African Legal Profession, 23 Michigan Journal of International Law 545 (2002)

Law Review Story, 50 Arkansas Law Review 77 (1997)

Contributing Editor, Yearbook of Commercial Arbitration, Volume XX (1995); Volume XXI (1996)

A Survey of Feminist Jurisprudence, 16 University of Arkansas Little Rock Law Journal 183 (1994)

Privacy Jurisprudence of the Press Complaints Commission, 1994 Anglo-American Law Review 133 (co-authored).

Gender & Bureaucracy, 3 Business Ethics: A European Journal 71 (1994).

The Law of Defamation: An Arkansas Primer, 42 Arkansas Law Review 915 (1989).