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Abstract:
Feminists have often criticized law's ignorance of women's day-to-day, lived experiences, even as they have sought to reveal the variety among those experiences. This article builds on both critiques to argue for greater attentiveness to a neglected aspect of women's situation: place. Specifically, Professor Pruitt asserts that the hardships and vulnerability that mark the lives of rural women and constrain their moral agency are overlooked or discounted by a contemporary cultural presumption of urbanism.

This Article considers judicial responses to the realities of rural women's lives in relation to three legal issues: intimate abuse, termination of parental rights, and abortion. In each of these contexts, Pruitt scrutinizes judicial treatment of spatial isolation, lack of anonymity, a depressed socioeconomic landscape, and other features of rural America. She contrasts responses to the plight of rural women in these legal contexts, where courts often show little empathy or understanding, with judicial responses to the vulnerability and hardships associated with sustaining rural livelihoods in non-gendered contexts.

Drawing on rural sociology and economics, as well as from judicial opinions, Pruitt argues that the combination of features that constitute rural America seriously disadvantages rural women. She further maintains that this disadvantage is aggravated when society's prevailing urban perspective obscures legal recognition of the rural. Unlike Catharine MacKinnon's landmark work under a similar title, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Pruitt does not purport to articulate grand theory. Nevertheless, by showing how features of rural life are often overlooked or misunderstood by legal actors, and by explaining the legal relevance of these features to critical junctures at which women encounter the law, Pruitt begins the process of articulating a feminist theory of the rural.

feminist theory, anti-essentialism, abortion, domestic violence, termination of parental rights, rural, geography, spatial isolation, disadvantage

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. Viewed together, these clusters of opinions reveal a comprehensive - if not entirely coherent - judicial portrait of rurality. They also provide an overview of the many instances when a rural setting is relevant to a legal outcome. Implicated are issues of tort, property, criminal, and constitutional law, among others.

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."

rhetoric, rural, land use, property, tort, criminal procedure, criminal law, self-sufficiency, informal norms, equal protection, idealization

Abstract:
This Article argues that a more grounded and nuanced understanding of women's lived realities requires legal scholars to engage geography. Because spatial aspects of women's lives implicate inequality and moral agency, they have direct relevance to an array of legal issues. The Article thus deploys the tools of critical geographers--space, place, and scale--to inform law and policy-making about an overlooked population for whom spatiality can be a profoundly influential force: rural women.

gender, geography, rural, urban, domestic violence, economic restructuring, feminist theory, feminism, inequality, disadvantage, household economics, rural sociology, production, reproduction, globalization

Abstract:
Diversity is touted as a preeminent concern and important goal of the legal profession generally and of the UC Davis School of Law specifically. Known as King Hall (after Martin Luther King, Jr.), the UC Davis School of Law is relatively diverse compared to other law schools and enjoys a reputation as a kinder, gentler place to study law. This article and the study on which it is based investigate whether King Hall truly is, for students of various demographic backgrounds, the uniquely supportive community it purports to be. The article thus contributes to the burgeoning literature on the influence of a student's race, ethnicity and gender on her law school experience.

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.

discrimination, legal education, legal profession, socratic method, race, gender, ethnicity

Abstract:
This article considers welfare reform's impact in rural America. Professor Pruitt asserts that federal welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), reflects an urban political agenda that failed to consider rural realities. Based on her analysis of two particular populations - those living in persistent poverty and those in female-headed households - she concludes that PRWORA has exacerbated rural poverty.

While PRWORA's focus was on work and time limits on assistance, it gave individual states latitude to design and implement programs tailored to their economic and demographic circumstances. Pruitt illustrates how some states with significant rural populations used this latitude to institute programs that respond to the structural barriers endemic to rural locales: greater transportation challenges in light of spatial isolation from jobs, services, and training opportunities; limited child care choices; and deficits in human capital. But she also points out how states' responses to these challenges have been piecemeal, and their ameliorative impact limited, in the absence of rural economic development. Pruitt analyzes the contradiction between the decline in the number of rural families receiving welfare (a rate commensurate with that of urban families in the PRWORA era), and the rise in rural poverty since 2002.

Building on evidence that PRWORA has aggravated the hardships of the rural poor, the article closes by theorizing our national failure to address rural poverty. Pruitt asserts that the failure is due in part to rural myths and stereotypes, including the significance of the informal economy as a safety net for the rural poor. She also discusses the difficulty in seeing the problem of rural poverty because of a tendency for urban residents to romanticize even hardship in the context of the rural idyll they imagine. Pruitt argues that rural myths must be revealed as such, and the limitations and downsides of rural interpersonal familiarity and community must be fully understood, before law and policy makers will address rural poverty in a meaningful way.

welfare, welfare reform, rural poverty, spatial isolation, geography, community, lack of anonymity, labor market, transportation, child care

Abstract:
Since the earliest days of U.S. legal history, women have sought legal redress for statements about their sexual behavior or otherwise about them as sexual beings. These female plaintiffs have typically employed defamation law to sue on the basis of communications that undermined their reputations for sexual propriety, which the law referred to as chastity. In this article, Professor Pruitt tracks women's use of defamation law from the earliest recorded cases to the turn of the twenty-first century, noting how changing society and evolving legal doctrines have altered judicial responses to these claims.

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.

defamation, false light, sexual slander, chastity, sexual propriety, privacy, dignitary injury, rhetorical hyperbole, truth, falsity, first amendment

Abstract:
Although there have long been black lawyers in South Africa, during apartheid only a handful joined the ranks of the country's large commercial firms. Now, in the post-apartheid period, these firms are keenly aware of a range of economic and political incentives to hire black attorneys, and most are doing so at a record pace. Very few black attorneys, however, are enduring the path to partnership in these firms. Based on more than seventy-five interviews conducted in South Africa in 1999 and 2000, this Article both documents and critically examines the reasons for black attrition. While firms' incentives to integrate include commercial ones associated with clients' newfound attention to the racial diversity of their vendors, such incentives apparently have not yet outweighed the forces impeding integration - some of those forces being incidental to the country's history and politics, some attributable to the institutional characteristics of law firms, and others to the acts of individuals within those institutions.

Although the under-representation of blacks in these firms is frequently attributed to blacks' own failings or choices, Professor Pruitt argues that the lack of integration is also the result of discriminatory actions of white individuals and the institutions they run. Building on the descriptive platform she has laid, Professor Pruitt goes on to construct a model of efficient discrimination with respect to South Africa's elite legal sector, arguing that firms are able to survive in the new marketplace, even absent retention of black attorneys, because the actual power of the incentives to integrate does not match the rhetoric around it. In addition, because no firm is achieving integration and thereby taking advantage of existing incentives, the integration quotient is not being raised, leaving firms effectively unchallenged by the market to retain and promote black lawyers.

affirmative action, South Africa, legal profession, integration, law firms, tournament theory, internal labor markets, efficient discrimination, legal education

Abstract:
In this Article, Professor Pruitt discusses conceptions of the injury associated with defamation law, focusing in particular on sexual slander cases that were brought in the early nineteenth century, before statements that impugned a woman's chastity were deemed slander per se. During this time, women had to prove so-called special damages in order to state a cause of action. Courts showed some flexibility in what they recognized as constituting special damages, even stretching to recognize pecuniary harm in damaged personal relationships. Nevertheless, courts refused to recognize injuries stemming from and related to emotional distress injuries, and they were often skeptical that a variety of harms claimed by women were the direct and natural consequences of the offending statement.

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, sexual slander, chastity, sexual propriety, history, property, reputation, damages

Abstract:
In this era of municipal anti-immigrant ordinances and federal-local cooperation to enforce immigration laws, legal issues associated with immigration are playing out at multiple scales, from the national down to the local. Legal actors at the municipal, county, and state levels have become front-line policymakers and law enforcers in relation to immigrant populations. This essay calls attention to phenomenal surge in Latina/o immigration into the rural South in recent years, and it considers how that socio-spatial milieu may influence these legal matters at the local level.

Among other issues, the essay discusses the enhanced opportunity for racial profiling in the context of communities where law enforcement officers are more familiar and socially integrated with the populations they patrol. It also considers how bias may be fueled by the static nature of rural communities, many of which are historically ethnically and racially homogeneous, while others have been socially and racially defined by a Black-White divide. In assessing these legal issues, the essay considers how rural places in the South construct the Latina/o experience differently than "gateway" cities and states in the West and Southwest. In turn, it looks at how the Latina/o in-migration is remaking these rural places, these "quintessentially 'American' spaces."

While the impact of this demographic shift is ongoing, studies suggest that Latina/os are revitalizing the South economically, as they also re-shape the rural socio-cultural milieu. Nevertheless, many of the deep-rooted economic and social problems associated with the region persist, as does distrust between long-time residents and Latina/o newcomers. Just as sociologists, demographers, and economists are studying the phenomenon of immigration into the rural South, this essay argues that it also merits the attention of legal scholars.

rural, South, Latina, Latino, Hispanic, race, ethnicity, geography, difference, discrimination, culture, socioeconomic class, labor, immigration

Abstract:
This Article considers the phenomenon of domestic violence in relation to the rural-urban axis. Written for a symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at the University of Wisconsin, it assesses the difference that rurality makes to the occurrence, investigation, prosecution, and judicial decision-making regarding this crime. Among the factors analyzed are spatial or geographic isolation, along with the social isolation and lack of anonymity it fosters; severe economic disadvantage; the entrenched nature of rural patriarchy; and legal actors who are often ill-informed about domestic violence and constrained by limited resources. These rural differences are presented through the lens of critical geography, using space, place and scale as analytical tools.

The Article thus provides an illustration of rurality as difference - difference from what has become the implicit urban norm in legal scholarship and in a great deal of law- and policy-making. It concludes by arguing for place-specific responses aimed at diminishing the obstacles to justice that confront rural victims of domestic violence. It further asserts that the solutions to this social problem must be multi-scalar (or multi-jurisdictional), using local know-how that is informed by universal norms that establish women's rights and dignity.

domestic violence, gender, geography, intimate partner violence, women, crime, social problems, space, place, scale, feminism, feminist legal theory, rural, urban

Abstract:
This essay, an entry for the on-line Sloan Work and Family Encyclopedia, provides an overview of work-family challenges in the context of rural America. Among the issues addressed are lack of economic diversification and opportunity; deficits in human capital; the dearth of childcare, transportation and other services that facilitate employment; and the deeply entrenched character of gender roles in rural societies. The entry discusses not only concerns related to rural socioeconomic disadvantage, but also those arising from the distances that separate rural residents from work, educational opportunities, and services.

The essay notes that rural families are sometimes disserved by policies and regulations that reflect urban agendas and may be unworkable for rural residents, in the context of rural economies. It suggests the need for more systematic, national sampling and a case-comparative approach to location-based studies. Such data collection and analysis would permit generalization across rural places, while also enhancing our understanding of the variety among such communities.

rural, gender, family, work, employment, informal economy, microbusiness, children, child care, rural poverty, transportation

Abstract:
In this article, Professor Pruitt seeks to raise the visibility of the roughly twenty percent of our population who live in rural America - an often forgotten fifth - in relation to the particular challenges presented by adolescent substance abuse. Despite popular notions that substance abuse is essentially an urban phenomenon, recent data demonstrate that it is also a significant problem in rural America. Rural youth now abuse most substances, including alcohol and tobacco, at higher rates and at younger ages than their urban peers.

Written for a symposium on drug policy, Pruitt assesses the social, economic and spatial milieu in which rural adolescent substance abuse has burgeoned. Some features of rural communities, such as a tolerance for youth and lenient and informal law enforcement responses, appear to be beneficial to youth there. 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. Additional challenges are posed by the depressed socioeconomic conditions in many rural areas.

Arguing that national drug policies often reflect urban agendas and leave rural communities disserved, Pruitt calls for policies that are more sensitive to rural contexts and that will respond more effectively to this social problem there. She 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, she 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.

crime, juvenile justice, rural, urban, geography, drug abuse, drug use, substance abuse, youth, children, adolescent, diversion program, socioeconomic class, community

Abstract:
This Article explores the potential of international development efforts and human rights law to enhance the livelihoods of rural women in the developing world. In particular, the Article takes up the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which enumerates in Article 14 specific rights for rural women as a class. Pruitt’s focus here is on Article 14’s guarantees in relation to land ownership, education, development planning, access to credit, marketing facilities and technology, and other rights that are linked closely to women’s role as the architects of food security. While CEDAW has attracted enormous attention among legal scholars in the decades since its inception, Pruitt’s is the first scholarly article to focus on the Convention’s attention to rural women. To better understand the potential of CEDAW in relation to this particular population, Pruitt examines the drafting history of Article 14, as well as the most recent country reports of four Member States: China, Ghana, India, and South Africa.

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.

Informal order, Custom, Customary law, Indigenous, Stasis, Migration, Development, International, Globalization, Women, Rural, Urban, CEDAW, Discrimination, Inequality, Agriculture, Food Security, Education, Micro-credit, Co-operatives, Land Reform, Property Rights

Abstract:
This is the first in a series of articles that maps legal conceptions of (in)equality onto the socio-geographical concept of spatial inequality, with a view to generating legal remedies for those living in places marked by socioeconomic disadvantage. Written for a symposium on “rural law,” this article considers in particular whether the funding and delivery of government services at the county level in the state of Montana violate the state’s constitution because of the grossly disparate abilities among Montana counties to finance and provide such services. Pruitt’s analysis focuses on children as a particularly vulnerable and immobile population, many of whom are deprived of government services based on place of residence. Further, the article scrutinizes the provision of health and human services as a category of services to which Montana children experience great variations in access. 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.

Children, juveniles, minors, spatial inequality, local government, county government, state government, local taxation, property taxation, uneven development, devolution, state constitutions, equal protection, equality, dignity, rural, rural and urban, health and human services, welfare