by Lisa R. Pruitt & Ezera Miller-Walfish, Class of 2022
Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent voting rights decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee was very bad news for rural residents (and, indeed, all voters) in terms of the precedent set, there is perhaps a silver lining to be found in the dissenting opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan and joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. That dissent took the concept of distance–rural spatiality–more seriously than any faction of the Supreme Court has ever done.
Cruz Reynoso, former California Supreme Court Justice and my colleague at UC Davis School of Law for two decades, died a few days ago at the age of 90. Many are offering remembrances of Reynoso -- who the faculty and staff at the law school knew as just "Cruz"-- and it's interesting for me as a ruralist to see the number of references to "rural" in his life's story.
UC Davis School of Law has launched an exciting new Water Justice Clinic designed to advocate for clean, healthy and adequate water supplies for all Californians. The new Clinic is a project of the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies, in partnership with the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, and will offer unique environmental justice advocacy opportunities for King Hall students.
Investigative reporter and Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi says yes. His New York Times bestselling book, "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," is the featured work in this year's UC Davis Campus Community Book Project.
The UC Davis Center for Poverty Research will host a major conference on the impact place has on poverty and effective interventions on November 13-14. Our own Professor Lisa Pruitt is the conference's organizer.
The UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance will host The Grapes of Wrath Symposium on Friday, March 7, to explore John Steinbeck's work directly as well as the larger social, cultural and historical issues it raises, while celebrating this 75th anniversary year since the publication of the epic novel.
The symposium, open to the public and free-of-charge, will be held in Lab A at Wright Hall from 10:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.
One of the most e-mailed items in the New York Times for the past day or so has been Claire Vaye Watkins "The Ivy League Was Another Planet." (The alternative headline is "Elite Colleges Are As Foreign as Mars.") In her op-ed, Watkins recounts her journey from nonmetropolitan Pahrump, Nevada to college at the University of Nevada, Reno.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has drawn national attention to economic inequality, and several new studies and a book just published also invite us to consider the acuteness of this inequality, as well as its causes and/or consequences. These publications all highlight education, to one degree or another, as a key indicator of class and class mobility.
