Among those judged harshly in relation to geography are impoverished parents who live in rural places. Yet judgments of these parents are particularly unfair in that poor rural parents often do not have ready access to State support in the form of programs that would permit them to be better parents. That is, spatial obstacles may prevent them from meeting their children’s first order needs by gaining access to public benefits such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), housing assistance, and nutrition programs. These parents are often similarly without reasonable access to the types of services and programs that would enhance their parenting skills, either because such programs are not offered in rural places or because the transportation obstacles to reach the programs are too great.

This Essay looks at termination of parental rights in relation to the impractical expectations—indeed, at times impossible ones—that courts sometimes impose on rural parents as a condition for keeping their children. It surveys cases that have used rural residence as a strike against a parent in termination proceedings. While poverty is an impermissible basis for terminating parental rights, cases reveal that place may become a proxy for poverty and be cited as a reason for removal of a child. This Essay disputes the appropriateness of such judgments, particularly in light of the immobility of the poor and the challenges that rural spatiality creates for service delivery and access. In doing so, it highlights the hypocrisy of the State’s judgment of rural parents, including for their failure to avail themselves of public services, even as the State fails to make meaningfully available the very assistance and services that would enable them to be better parents.

My Essay seeks to enhance Williams’s powerful and path-breaking discussion of the white working class in four ways. Part I brings geography explicitly into consideration by arguing that the culture wars—which I believe Williams aligns correctly along a broad and fuzzy line between the working class and the professional/managerial class—similarly align along the rural-urban axis. Just as liberal elites tend to shun the white working class, they also express disdain for rural and small-town residents. Indeed, among urbanites and “coastal elites,” rural Americans have become a proxy for the working class—the uncouth, the uncultured, and the illiberal. I document this increasing geographic polarization specifically in relation to the 2008 Presidential election.

Based on this argument that the opposing sides in the class culture wars are now represented (at least rhetorically) by the rural and the urban, I take up three other issues. Part II of the Essay adds nuance to Williams’s broad-brush class dichotomy by introducing other classes and sub-classes that are particularly relevant to the rural context. Specifically, I show how Williams’s implicitly metropolitan class taxonomy parallels a similar divide in nonmetropolitan communities, and I discuss the role of morality as a basis for differentiation among factions of working class whites in rural settings. Then, in Part III, I argue that cultural and political disdain for rural folks prevents law- and policy-makers from seeing and addressing the distinct challenges facing the rural citizenry, including issues associated with work-life security. I conclude in Part IV with thoughts on work itself as common ground between the professional/managerial class and the white working class. I call for the work-identified professional/managerial class to let go of stereotypes of the white working class as lazy and ignorant and to acknowledge how hard the working class actually do work. I also argue that liberal elites should recognize the structural and cultural obstacles to education and advancement facing working class whites, just as they have recognized similar obstacles stemming from race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion. Recognizing a shared commitment to work across the classes could foster political détente and, ultimately, a more robust political coalition in support of work-family reform.

My thoughts about Williams’s book and the class culture wars are informed by my own rural upbringing, as well as by my status as a “class migrant,” which Williams defines as those “born and raised working class, who join the upper-middle class through access to elite education.” In addition, my comments and analysis rely heavily on two sources—one conventional, the other not—which complement Williams’s fine work. First, I draw on Jennifer Sherman’s 2009 book, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America. This book provides a rural-specific counterpart to Williams’s more generalized explanation of why morality and family—and therefore cultural issues more broadly—are so important to the white working class. The second, rather unorthodox source is journalist Joe Bageant’s 2007 book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Bageant’s insights as a cultural critic—though articulated in a sharper tone and reflecting a more anecdotal method—are uncannily similar to those which Williams and Sherman document in academic fashion. Finally, I illustrate how President Obama has endorsed the core ideas of all three authors.

Based largely on extensive statistical analysis of a student survey conducted at King Hall in February 2004, we conclude that, as at other law schools, statistically significant differences exist between the self-reported experiences and perceptions of women and minority students, on the one hand, and their male and white peers, on the other. We also find that students' perceptions and experiences often evolve over the course of their time in law school, with students becoming more negative as their law school careers progress. The data and analysis reveal that race, ethnicity, gender and often class year are significant predictors of student comfort, satisfaction, and success.

Our study indicates that King Hall is, effectively, two different law schools. It is a comfortable and supportive place for those who might be considered mainstream or insiders, those who embody what we label the mean voice of King Hall. But it is an often uncomfortable and alienating place for many minority and women students, relative outsiders whose perspectives differ significantly from that mean, or average. This discomfort operates to their distinct detriment academically and emotionally.

We conclude that a disproportionate number of students of color and women do not experience King Hall as a kind, gentle, and supportive environment for the study of law. To address this inequality, we recommend that the leaders of King Hall renew their commitment to achieve even greater diversity among students, faculty and staff. We also argue, based on widespread and vehement criticism of the Socratic method by students of color and women, that the time has come to re-think and modify its use. Finally, we suggest that law schools frequently provide opportunities for all students to express their perceptions about their legal educations. Responses should then be evaluated by students' demographic features to ensure that the experiences of some groups are not obscured by the average.

The suggestions offered based on the study of King Hall may be appropriately implemented at other law schools, for if an institution as well intentioned and diverse as King Hall is alienating many students of color and women, it is reasonable to assume that other law schools may be even more hostile to these student populations. If law schools, as the gatekeepers of the legal profession, truly wish to diversify the profession and make it a more welcome and tolerable one for persons of diverse backgrounds, simply doing better than in the past, or doing better than other law schools, is not sufficient.

Lack of sustainable development in rural areas is a major force behind the massive rural-to-urban migration across Asia. An enormous challenge currently facing India and many of its neighbors is thus how to manage the migration. One aspect of that challenge is providing for the nation’s rural remnant — for those who are left behind in villages and towns as cities burgeon and sprawl. To mitigate rural-to-urban migration and accommodate growth that is sustainable both environmentally and economically, India must attend to rural development. This means responding to infrastructure deficits in order to meet some very basic needs (e.g., water, sanitation), but it also means providing education and health care, along with rural economic development through strategic thinking about agricultural production and job creation. Meeting this challenge has clear implications for how the nation of India, along with its state and local governments, distribute government resources.

This Article considers India’s uneven development across the rural-urban axis through the lens of the capabilities framework developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The capabilities approach argues for universal human rights based on a recognition of each human being “as an agent and an end” and calls for a “threshold level of each capability” below which citizens are not truly functioning as humans. Nussbaum also refers to equality as an aspect of capabilities, linking it in particular to dignity and seeing it as a salient concern in relation to core socioeconomic rights, such as those to health care and education.

Nussbaum’s thinking on capabilities has been greatly informed by her time in India and by the situation there. Further, Nussbaum references the rural-urban axis as among the power disparities relevant to citizens’ realization of capabilities. In using a capabilities frame for assessing India’s approach to rural development, this Article attends particularly to the life, bodily health, and education capabilities, arguing that India should aspire to a degree of parity across the rural-urban axis in providing these foundational capabilities. Further, the Article analogizes rurality to disability and gender as a crucial characteristic to which government should attend in programming to meet the needs of rural citizens. The Article also considers briefly the potential of the Indian Constitution to mitigate distributive inequities associated with government’s relative neglect of rural populations.

Finally, the Article discusses what is at stake for India and the rest of Asia in staking out a path of sustainable development that explicitly considers the rural-urban axis. This path should move beyond the parallel tracks of urban planning and rural development so that development and planning go hand in hand along the rural-urban continuum and across the nation. Regional towns and small cities are sure to be a critical part of any solution to the present state of grossly uneven development.

Like more than a third of U.S. states, Arizona delegates to counties the responsibility of providing counsel to indigent criminal defendants. Individual Arizona counties must finance this service, and each also has the autonomy to determine how best to provide it, e.g., by establishing a Public Defender office, paying contract attorneys, and/or appointing counsel. Inequalities and problems associated with underfunding of indigent defense arise, however, because county governments in Arizona are financed primarily by local tax revenue, leaving counties with dramatically differing capacities to provide both discretionary and mandatory services. These disparities occur in part because Arizona is unevenly developed to a dramatic degree. For example, more than 60% of the state’s residents live in Maricopa County, while five of the state’s remaining 14 counties are each home to as little as 1% or less of the state’s population. Further, poverty rates and income levels vary dramatically from county to county, with nonmetropolitan counties typically featuring the highest poverty rates and the lowest per capita and median household incomes. Because the fiscal capacity of a local government is limited by its residents’ per capita income, this uneven development—coupled with an emphasis on local tax revenue to finance county government and virtually no effort at redistribution of tax revenue at the state level—creates severe spatial inequalities in service provision among counties.

To illustrate the county-to-county variations in the funding and delivery of indigent defense services, we discuss in detail the economic and demographic profiles of five Arizona counties: metropolitan behemoth Maricopa County, with a population of 4 million and a diverse economy; sparsely populated, barely metropolitan and amenity-rich Coconino County, home of the Grand Canyon and a tourism-driven economy; persistent poverty Navajo and Apache counties, both with significant American Indian lands and American Indian populations, who consume state justice systems services at a lower rate than non-Indians; and Arizona’s most rural county, Greenlee, with only 8,000 residents, a dearth of lawyers, and a surprisingly affluent, mining-dependent economy.

In addition to focusing on disparities in funding of indigent defense among these five Arizona counties, we also assess the counties’ provision of indigent defense for several problems commonly associated with underfunding: caseloads and competency, financial conflicts of interest, lack of parity with prosecution, and the risk that a single case will overwhelm a county’s defense system. Despite some gaps in publicly available information detailing the funding and provision of indigent defense—information that could be developed through discovery should litigation be initiated—we find sufficient evidence of significant county-to-county variations in funding and delivery of indigent defense to suggest constitutional violations. At particular risk from a systemic standpoint are nonmetropolitan counties that do not have Public Defenders but instead rely entirely on lawyers with whom county governments contract to provide indigent defense. To the extent that these lawyers are supervised or their caseloads monitored, that task falls to local Superior Courts, a situation which itself raises problems.

While Arizona’s dramatically uneven development and heavy reliance on local taxation to finance indigent defense make it a particularly interesting case study, we assert that the legal arguments we formulate could apply to any of the 18 states that fund indigent defense primarily or entirely at the county level.

County governments in Montana are financed principally by local property tax revenue. Uneven development across the state, from one county to the next, consequently confers on individual counties vastly different capacities to provide services. Because of the lack of centralized funding for services such as public health and other human services, those who live in sparsely populated, relatively undeveloped and property-poor counties are least served by local government. At the same time, wealthy counties—which tend also to be more populous—have economies that are more diversified, property tax bases that are more substantial, and a correspondingly greater capacity to deliver services. More densely populated counties also face lower per capita costs for delivering services because they are better able to achieve economics of scale.

To illustrate these disparities, Pruitt discusses in detail the economic and demographic profiles of five Montana counties. These include Yellowstone County, home to Billings, the state’s largest city; fast-growing Gallatin County, which exemplifies rural gentrification and the rural resort phenomenon; Stillwater County, a sparsely populated nonmetropolitan county with significant mineral wealth; Big Horn County, a persistent poverty county with a majority American Indian population; and Wheatland County, a tiny county with a dwindling population and an agriculture-based economy.

The legal critique of this spatially and economically uneven landscape relies primarily on the 1972 Montana Constitution, which is among the most progressive state constitutions in the nation. In particular, Pruitt argues that the constitution’s equal protection and dignity clauses are violated by the county government funding scheme and its consequences. The Montana equal protection clause forbids discrimination based on “race, color, sex, culture, social origin or condition, or political or religious ideas.” Pruitt maintains that significant disparities in service provision, which occur arbitrarily across county lines, violate this equality guarantee. Pruitt’s second argument is for state provision of a minimal degree of services to children. Relying on the constitution’s dignity clause and the doctrine of parens patriae, Pruitt argues that children cannot live with dignity unless their fundamental needs are met. She asserts that the typical emphasis on autonomy with respect to the dignity right is misplaced with regard to children. For the child population, Pruitt maintains that a right to dignity should be grounded instead in their inherent dependency and vulnerability, thus imposing a duty on the state to provide children’s first-order needs when their parents cannot or do not do so. In addition to this analysis under the Montana Constitution, the article also challenges the orthodoxy of U.S. constitutional jurisprudence regarding poor people, public benefits, and equal protection.

Finally, Pruitt argues that Montana’s school funding scheme, which has been the subject of recent litigation, now represents a better model—albeit a still-imperfect one—for financing public services. This is because the school funding formula seeks to level the funding playing field by providing more state monies, along with federal funds that are somewhat similarly allocated, to school districts based on the presence of at-risk students. School districts with the highest percentages of at-risk students tend also to be the school districts with poorer property tax bases. By contrast, the scheme for financing county government results in a situation in which more affluent counties are better able to provide services to residents, while those living in the most rural and property-poor counties have access only to very limited health and human services. Financing so linked to the local scale thus aggravates and further entrenches spatial inequalities, an outcome that is in contrast to the school funding formula, which aims to achieve greater substantive equality by channeling money to the schools with the greatest need.

While this article analyzes spatial inequality in the context of a specific state and with respect to a particular type of government service, the capacity and significance of spatial inequality as a critique of legal equality guarantees is not so limited. The services that governments provide implicate a wide range of rights, and these rights may be violated if the services are not provided in an equitable manner. Pruitt thus calls for all branches and scales of government to be more attentive to the difference place makes to service delivery, in order to ensure more even and fair access.

Written for a symposium called “Territory without Boundaries,” Pruitt’s discussion of CEDAW’s Article 14 is situated in the context of massive rural-to-urban migration worldwide. Indeed, its publication comes just months after demographers report that, on a global scale, urban dwellers began to outnumber those living in rural areas. As globalization creates conditions that induce migration, causing the populations of cities to burgeon and their territories to sprawl, those same forces shape rural places, too. Although that which is rural is often thought of as quintessentially local, rural livelihoods around the world are buffeted by economic restructuring, migration, and climate change. Pruitt thus considers CEDAW in relation to migration’s consequences for the women who are left behind. Among these consequences are enormous challenges, but also opportunities for change and empowerment.

Pruitt’s analysis raises several broad, structural issues. The first is the impact of rural spatiality—including a relative absence of formal legal institutions and actors—on the ability of rural women to realize the promise of international instruments such as CEDAW. The second is the extent to which development entails or encourages urbanization and how CEDAW’s vision for empowering rural women might influence the trajectory of development efforts. The third is the wisdom of development strategies that fuel migration’s urban juggernaut, particularly in light of changing perceptions and priorities in the developed world regarding food production and sustainability.

Among other observations and conclusions, Pruitt lauds the priorities and framework of CEDAW’s Article 14 in terms of the ways in which they seek to foster women’s agency and material well-being. These include CEDAW’s aspiration to secure women’s roles in development planning and implementation and to empower them as producers of food. Pruitt also discusses the potential for CEDAW’s Article 14 to accommodate legal pluralism, which can be particularly relevant in rural places, where custom and local sources of authority tend to be more entrenched and influential than in urban locales. Finally, Pruitt suggests that the population churn associated with migration represents an opening for the renegotiation of gender roles and other cultural practices in rural places. This is because migration enhances the prospect of raising the consciousness of rural communities regarding national and international legal norms, while also facilitating enforcement of rural women’s rights by fostering their access to formal legal actors and institutions at higher scales, in urban places. Throughout her analysis, Pruitt considers parallels between developing and developed nations with regard to rural-urban difference, population trends, the industrialization of agriculture, and the social and economic consequences of these phenomena.

The Article assesses the social, economic and spatial milieu in which rural adolescent substance abuse has burgeoned. Some features of some rural communities, such as a tolerance for youth and lenient and informal law enforcement responses, appear to benefit youth. Indeed, these are consistent with juvenile justice trends, such as diversion programs. Yet other characteristics of rural communities, such as limited social service and healthcare infrastructures, undermine the efficacy of such programs.

Arguing that national drug policies often reflect urban agendas and leave rural communities disserved, this Article calls for policies that are more sensitive to rural contexts. It advocates nuanced empirical research that will provide a more comprehensive understanding of rural risk factors and, in turn, inform rural prevention, treatment, and diversion programs. Finally, it argues that federal, state and local responses to adolescent substance abuse must tackle deficiencies in rural infrastructure, while keeping in mind factors that differentiate rural places from what has become the implicit urban norm in law- and policy-making.

In studying what courts viewed to be special damages and therefore worthy of redress in this context, Professor Pruitt’s work reveals several insights. First, we learn something of the nature of the reputational interest protected by defamation law. In particular, Professor Pruitt argues that courts viewed these slandered women’s reputations as a form of property, and they ignored the dignitary nature of the injury. In addition, these cases provide an opportunity to see another example of the gendered trends in tort law that have been identified by scholars such as Professor Martha Chamallas. Professor Chamallas has argued that tort law values property and economic injury over relational and emotional injury, and that injuries may be judicially characterized as one or the other based upon the gender of the sufferer. Professor Pruitt’s analysis points out the presence of these value hierarchies in sexual slander cases, just as Professor Chamallas has established their presence elsewhere in tort law.

Finally, Professor Pruitt argues that sexual slander law was an additional way in which women’s sexual propriety was commodified, ultimately to the benefit of their fathers and husbands. She argues that a preferable scheme would have permitted courts more expansive jurisdiction over sexual slander claims, as well as power to provide a more expansive array of remedies. That is, drawing on the remedies of apology and repentance that had been available in English ecclesiastical courts—remedies remarkably similar to retraction and declaratory judgment remedies that are associated with contemporary defamation reform—nineteenth-century courts could have avoided propertizing women’s virtue. At the same time, they could have provided appropriate remedies to more of the women who had been injured by sexual slander.

Defamation law was historically highly responsive to injuries resulting from such communications, but the ways in which the media portray and undermine women are constantly shifting. Professor Pruitt focuses in particular on late twentieth century defamation cases related to chastity and sexual portrayals. She observes that courts still recognize injury to a woman’s reputation from a straightforward assertion of adultery, prostitution, or certain sexually “deviant” behaviors. Contemporary defamation fails, however, to acknowledge or provide redress for many other statements that ridicule and demean women in relation to their sexuality. Professor Pruitt’s analysis illustrates how constitutional doctrines associated with defamation law, such as the fact-opinion dichotomy and the related protection of rhetorical hyperbole, defeat women’s legal claims and obscure the dignitary injuries they suffer.

As a solution to this legal oversight, Professor Pruitt argues for recognition of a new tort for technically false statements that demean or ridicule. She explains how such a tort is consistent with first amendment jurisprudence, and she discusses how it is preferable to defamation law in terms of its candid characterization of injury as one to dignity, rather than to reputation. While she acknowledges that her proposed solution is not foolproof (and risks continuing legal regulation of women’s sexuality), Professor Pruitt argues that it is nevertheless preferable to provide a remedy that women may invoke rather than to leave them entirely without the option of legal redress.