Rural Rhetoric
posted by Melissa Waters
I’ve spent some time over the past few days reading through the various law review reprints that tend to collect on my desk during the school year. The reprint that I read this morning was so entertaining and intriguing that I just had to mention it. It’s “Rural Rhetoric,” by Lisa Pruitt at UC Davis, published recently in the Connecticut Law Review (download it here). Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
This Article investigates law’s constitutive rhetoric about rural people, places, and livelihoods. Specifically, it considers five categories of judicial opinions that discuss the legal relevance of rurality: judicial self-identification as rural; definitions of rural; line-drawing between rural and urban; taking judicial notice of rural characteristics; and idealized portrayals of the rural. … This collection of judicial narratives reveals that law’s portrait of rurality has been greatly influenced by popular perceptions of the rural that persist in our national consciousness, including nostalgia for our rural past. Such nostalgia is reflected in judicial assumptions that rural areas are safe and that rural people are neighborly. It is also evident in idyll-ising rhetoric about rural land. In addition, the long-standing notion that law should play less of a role in rural livelihoods persists, apparently based on assumptions that rural people are self-sufficient, rural communities self-contained.
The cases surveyed illustrate not only how legal rhetoric constitutes, maintains, and transforms the rural, but also how this rhetoric demonstrably influences outcomes. With respect to some issues, law’s rhetoric – and therefore law itself – lags behind reality, due in part to out-dated assumptions about rural communities. Other legal rules have evolved to reflect rural realities, changed as they are in recent years. While this Article lauds courts for the attention they have paid to the dimension of place in legal analysis, it nevertheless argues that judges should be more careful not to rely on stereotypes in making and applying legal rules. Judges should pay closer attention to rural realities, including the differences among the many places and people they label “rural.”
Like me, Professor Pruitt grew up in a little old country town in the beautiful Ozark hills of Arkansas, so this is an article that she was born to write. It makes for fascinating reading. I should admit that I might be a bit biased in Professor Pruitt’s favor — not only because she hails from the great state of Arkansas, but also because she had the good sense to discuss an opinion written by my father, the late H. Franklin Waters, who was a federal judge in Arkansas for over twenty years. In Horton v. Taylor, he took judicial notice of the enormous importance of decent country roads to rural voters, and of the resulting pivotal role that road grader operators play in the political fortunes of Arkansas’ county judges. (County judges are the chief elected officials in rural Arkansas, and are judged by voters almost exclusively on their ability to maintain and improve county roads). Taking into account the peculiar circumstances of rural life in the Arkansas hill country, he held that road graders “were so closely linked to the county judge that they became his alter ego for purposes of political patronage, meaning that the judge could terminate and hire them at will.” The Eighth Circuit didn’t buy it — presumably, as Professor Pruitt notes, because “sitting far from rural Arkansas, the court was skeptical that a position as menial as road grader operator could be so significant.”
But my father knew whereof he spoke. Shortly after he was appointed to the federal bench, he took a trip down to the tiny west Arkansas farm town of Slatonville, where he was born and raised. One of the old-timers in town stopped him and said, “Well, Franklin, I hear you’re some kind of damn big shot these days. Can you help us get somebody out here to blacktop these here roads?” My father had to confess to his former neighbor that he couldn’t be of much help. In the vocational hierarchy that still predominates in the country’s last remaining, wonderful rural places, the federal judge remains a far less powerful individual than the county judge.
Kudos to Professor Pruitt for crafting a delightful and truly original piece of scholarship.
July 18, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books
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Paul Horwitz - July 18, 2007 at 3:50 pm
See also Debra Lyn Bassett’s article, Ruralism, 88 Iowa L. Rev. 273 (2003); it’s also available on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
Our society has a “love-hate” relationship with its rural communities. While revering rural areas as embodying the ultimate in “quality of life,” rural citizens are simultaneously denigrated as uneducated, backward, and unsophisticated. In this Article, Professor Bassett notes that our society’s focus, its programs, its culture, and its standards are based on an urban assumption. This urban focus both overshadows and marginalizes rural dwellers. Professor Bassett argues that “ruralism” is a pervasive form of discrimination – largely unrecognized, unacknowledged, and unexamined – and one often impacting most harshly those individuals who already are subject to other forms of discrimination based on gender, class, and race.
Rafael Pardo - July 18, 2007 at 7:17 pm
See also Katherine Porter’s article, Going Broke the Hard Way: The Economics of Rural Failure, 2005 Wis. L. Rev. 969. It too is available on SSRN, and its abstract is as follows:
Despite their role at the forefront of empirical research on the legal system, bankruptcy scholars are typical of the legal academy in their ignorance of the perspectives and experiences of rural Americans. No empirical study has systemically considered or acknowledged the role of community size in understanding when and why Americans turn to the bankruptcy system. Until now, the plight of rural families has been ignored. Overlooking the rural experience has impoverished our understanding of the financial pressures facing Americans. Without knowledge about rural Americans, who make up one-fifth of the U.S. population, our collective knowledge about the bankruptcy system generally and the economic pressure on all families is deeply flawed.
The original data developed in this Article reveal that rural America is home to extraordinary, unexplored economic distress. Contrary to conceptions about a rural cultural resistance to debt and the pastoral nature of rural life, rural families appear to be facing more severe financial hardship than their urban counterparts. The bankruptcy data reveal the depth and nature of the financial squeeze on rural families. Rural Americans live in areas where low wages and reduced job opportunities leave them with smaller incomes, but at the same time, they pay the same or higher prices for many of the same goods and services that urban Americans do. This is the worst of both worlds. Rural households have fewer dollars to spend and more demands on those dollars – both from past debts and current expenses. The nature of rural bankruptcies reflects the declining rural economy and the losing struggle of rural families who are trying to make ends meet despite severe income, job and medical problems. Far from being immune from the financial pressures on American households, rural families inhabit the deepest hollows in a map of economic well-being. Exploring this terrain offers critical insights on legal scholarship and bankruptcy policy.
The data presented in this Article expose important differences in the economics of bankrupt families that correlate with place of residence. Because these differences between urban and rural families have gone unexplored until now, our understanding of the bankruptcy system has been distorted. This distortion is more pernicious because scholars have frequently failed to acknowledge their urban bias. In showing how rural residence creates differences among bankruptcy filers, this Article exposes the need to consider rural perspectives in studies of all legal fields. Exploring how the role of place shapes use of the legal system opens up a new way to flush out variations in how laws actually operate. My conclusions suggest that future legal scholarship in all disciplines should be cognizant of the ways in which rurality, like race, gender, non-citizen status, or age, may influence perspectives on law.
The suffering of rural families revealed in the bankruptcy data has powerful implications for our understanding of the American economy as a whole. Learning how the economics of rural failure differ from that identified in urban areas allows a critical evaluation of how prior studies may have underreported the financial distress of bankrupt families by overlooking place of residence as a relevant factor. The rural bankruptcy data also offer a compelling example of the need for specialized rural policy in America. These findings highlight the need to build a healthy rural economy and offers insights into the problems that push rural families to bankruptcy, a financial breaking point.
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