The
following articles on SSRN might be of interest:
Lisa
R Pruitt, ‘The rural lawscape: space tames law tames space’ (forthcoming in I Braverman, N Blomley, D Delaney & A Kedar
(eds), The expanding spaces of law: a timely legal geography (Stanford
University Press, 2013)):
A
fundamental tenet of legal geographies scholarship is that the legal and the
spatial are mutually constituting. This chapter investigates that dynamic in
contemporary rural contexts in the United States. In particular, I posit that
law and rural spatiality are at odds with one another because the presence of
law as an ordering, governing, regulating force of state is in tension with the
socio-spatial character of rurality. Law seeks to tame or control rural
spatiality, but the material (low population density, dominance of nature over
the built environment) and associated social characteristics of rural and
remote places effectively resist those efforts. Rural spatiality’s features
tend to impede the efforts of law’s agents and processes, making for a thinner,
less robust legal presence.
Critical
and legal geographers, like legal scholars generally, have largely ignored the
rural end of the rural-urban continuum, reflecting a rarely acknowledged urban-normativity
(not to mention urban hubris). This chapter begins the work of recovering the
rural, bringing it into scholarly view in order to broaden our understanding of
the diffuse and localized operation of law in rural places. The chapter is thus
a step toward theorizing the significance and force of rural spatiality in
relation to law and legal processes. But the investigation into the rural
lawscape reveals something not only about rural difference, but also about the
otherwise obscure nature of law as variegated and variable. Further, looking to
the rural margins reveals something about the center because the process by
which law differentiates the rural also depicts, at least implicitly, the
default urban norm.
Mark
D Rosen ‘Religious institutions, liberal states, and the political architecture
of overlapping spheres’ (forthcoming, University of Illinois Law Review)
Alongside
the contemporary consensus favoring strong protections for individual religious
liberty, controversial new claims on behalf of religiously affiliated
institutions have been asserted with increasing frequency. They raise difficult
questions. For example, are churches entitled to a “ministerial exception”
exempting them from federal anti-discrimination laws when hiring and firing
ministers? Must Catholic hospitals be exempted from the Affordable Care Act’s
“contraception mandate,” which requires that employers provide their employees
health insurance that includes contraceptive devices, because use of
contraceptives is contrary to Catholic tenets?
