Law and Cultural Studies

I've been keeping an eye on elite bashing of working class and rural whites for years now, and I published my first article about it as long ago as 2011.  But the election of 2016 brought the disdainful badmouthing by the chattering classes to a fever pitch, and I've occasionally blogged about the phenomenon, including here and 

I've been guest blogging for the past few weeks over at Concurring Opinions and invite you over to that blog, on "the law, the universe, and everything" to see what I've been writing.  I've done a four-installment review/commentary on J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

The School of Law is proud to host the 2016 Conference of Asian Pacific American Law Faculty (CALALF) at King Hall today and tomorrow. There is a new addition to an already outstanding speaker line-up: California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu.

Here is the program from the CAPALF website.

Keynote Speakers & Distinguished Guests

Justice Goodwin Liu  | Associate Justice
Supreme Court of California

Simon (Young) Tam | The Slants

The legal dispute between the FBI and Apple over a locked iPhone is clouded in technical details that are hard for many to understand, an unclear area of law, and a terrible tragedy in San Bernardino that provokes unease and fear.

To make matters worse, the FBI and Apple are engaged in a very public battle using open letters, blog posts and hearings before Congress with terms like patriotism, marketability and backdoors.

Professor of Law Lisa Pruitt is also a faculty affiliate of the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research. She recently contributed to a podcast on Native Americans and Poverty.

From the Center's website:

In this edition of Poverty in Focus, visiting scholar Ezra Rosser and UC Davis Law professor and Center faculty affiliate Lisa Pruitt discuss a range of issues related to Native American Poverty, from its lack of visibility and interest for legal scholars to its causes and possible solutions. 

“I’m a self-loathing law student,” confessed one of the students in my Critical Race Theory seminar this week. Several others immediately owned up to the same affliction. I will stipulate that self-loathing is probably not an affect we all should strive to achieve. But I was heartened anyway.

The United Nations 56th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 56) featured as its priority theme this year "the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges."  This focus on rural women is long overdue, given that rural women comprise a quarter of the world's population.  Further, women provide 43% of the world's agricultural labor, and they produce half of the world's food for direct consumption.

Professor Angela Harris has a new book out, titled Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia.

I responded last month to Martha McCluskey’s ClassCrits post, “Class as a Category of Vulnerability and Inequality.” In that initial response, I asserted that progressives need not choose between advocating mobility (the upward variety!) and advocating mobilization (collective action, labor rights) when it comes to class.

Ever since Ross Douthat discussed No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life in a July 2010 column, I’ve been fretting about some of the book’s findings.  This 2009 book discusses the authors' exhaustive study of college admissions, with particular attention to elite colleges.  Among the conclusions of Princeton sociologists Thomas Espensha