Berkeley Legal History Workshop Welcomes: Emily Prifogle

Emily Prifogle presents “Nature: Land Use & Access to Rural Space”.

Emily Prifogle, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School and in the department of history by courtesy. She teaches property law, family law, and a seminar on rural law. Prifogle’s current book project argues that the legal remaking of rural communities was a central feature of 20th-century America. The project uses case studies to examine critical topics such as land use and zoning, policing and prosecution, education equality, labor and economic opportunity, local community organizing and advocacy, and infrastructure and mobility—and reveals their manifestations in rural geographies, economies, and social norms. The result is a new legal history that tells a story of the rural Midwest in a constant process of transformation along lines of class, race, and gender in the 20th century.

ABSTRACT

The landscapes sketched in “Nature” investigate the production of knowledge and expertise about rural spaces through the study of land itself and land use law. Common themes from elsewhere in the book reappear in this chapter: the power of pioneer rhetoric in shaping the law and land, the impulse for efficiency, and the persistent worry about decline. Land use law was an expansive arena of conflict through which competing visions of, and knowledge about, the rural were articulated. The placemaking work of zoning ordinances, treaties, and nuisance law suppressed the place attachment of particular rural residents and communities in service of other visions of rural community and land uses. I compose the landscape using two common types of land use controls, early rural zoning ordinances and later right-to-farm laws governing nuisance suits. But I add a third example, Native off-reservation treaty rights, to show how claims to land emphasize how ideas about rural people and their use of the land manifested in and through the law.

If you would like a copy of the paper, please email Melina Cardenas at mcardenas@law.berkeley.edu