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How Viable is Viability? Artificial Womb Technology and the Threat to Abortion Access
Get PDFThe viability standard plays an important role in abortion access around much of the United States. In fact, before the Dobbs decision, the viability standard was the constitutional gatekeeper to abortion access and was uniform across the entire nation. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has removed the constitutional right to abortion altogether. Nevertheless, I will provide an argument as to why Dobbs does not signal the end of viability-based abortion around the U.S. I will prove the importance of the viability standard even in a post-Dobbs society, highlighting its operation within various state laws, such as Michigan’s Prop. 3, as well as its presence in federal bills aimed at codifying Roe. As an important factor in abortion regulation, it is important to note that viability is fluid and is subject to change depending on the context of medical technology. The artificial womb is a threat to the current understanding of viability, and its arrival is by no means far-fetched. The question this paper will address is how society should deal with viability after artificial womb technology becomes mainstream. The paper will explore potential alternatives to the viability standard, but ultimately conclude that viability ought to be retained where it is already used, and implemented where it is not, due to its inherent ability to fairly balance relevant interests in the abortion decision. This paper will advocate for reform envisaging legislative change to ground artificial wombs firmly within the private surrogacy sector, to distance them as being considered ‘medical apparatus’ capable of expediting viability
Intersectionality\u27s Travels to International Human Rights Law
Get PDFOver the last two decades, references to intersectionality have become increasingly common in international human rights law. Many human rights bodies now make use of intersectionality in some form, and scholars propose more widespread and in-depth intersectional analysis as a way to better capture how human rights are realized or violated. Against the backdrop of this intersectional turn, this article scrutinizes the dynamics of intersectionality’s travels to international human rights law, asking how power structures influence where and how intersectionality can travel, and how its meaning and use change across contexts.
This article provides a bird’s-eye view of different human rights institutions and identifies a number of factors that condition the use of intersectionality, including the presence of political precommitments and the flexibility to express them, the kind of document or procedure at issue and how it is structured, as well as the institutional culture of any given human rights body and the weight it gives to legitimacy concerns and controversy avoidance. This article also analyzes how scholarship conceptualizes intersectionality in the context of its travels to human rights, arguing that it is presented as an always-already legal notion that impedes attention to the dynamics of depoliticization within human rights. To challenge this depoliticization, this article suggests that it is necessary to loosen our commitment to human rights institutions as forces of social good and instead approach the intersectional turn in human rights from a perspective grounded in political commitments to Black feminism and other emancipatory projects
Power Shift, the South China Sea Dispute, and the Role of International Law
Get PDFThe arena of the law of the sea has become a battlefield for Sino-American legal warfare, commonly referred to as “lawfare,” and it is in the tumultuous waters of the South China Sea where this fierce contest of great powers rages. The divergent perspectives on international law, particularly regarding maritime law, between China and the United States stem from the countries’ distinct historical experiences, memories, and outlooks. This inherent disparity in epistemology shapes their comprehension of the fundamental tenets of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”), specifically the conflicting notions of mare clausum and mare liberum. Consequently, the universality of the law of the sea becomes compromised, tending towards a less comprehensive international framework. This article contends that any legal resolution to the South China Sea dispute must be scrutinized through the lens of balance-of-power considerations. It further proposes practical recommendations to enhance the clarity and efficacy of some of the UNCLOS institutions in response to the pressing demands of our time
Why Medical Error is Killing You (And Everyone Else)
Get PDFIn 2000, the infamous report To Err is Human rocked society with its focus on the pervasive danger of medical error. More than two decades later, medical error rates remain high and pose a consistent danger to patients. Today, medical error ranks as the fourth leading cause of death behind heart disease, cancer, and COVID-19. Medical error reflects the vulnerabilities of the healthcare process and may be diagnostic in nature. A large concern in responding to medical error is an overemphasis on blame and the idea that good physicians do not make mistakes. Our perspective on how to address medical error is flawed. The successful reduction of error will require rethinking how we respond to error and creating a culture of openness and transparency. Changing how we address error benefits all patients but is particularly important for racial and ethnic minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ population, whose healthcare needs have historically been overlooked.
This Article reviews what we know about medical error and the disproportionate effects of harm it can cause. I consider issues leading to the persistence of medical error and emphasize the need to improve patient safety, address harm to vulnerable communities, and decrease medical malpractice litigation. Successfully addressing error requires a multi-pronged approach that embraces different disciplines. First, the healthcare industry should emphasize restorative justice strategies and institute legal safeguards, such as increased protections for apologies and information disclosure from healthcare institutions. Second, communication theory and high reliability organizations offer model methodologies to both address and prevent harm from medical error. Third, error response should shift away from a culture of blame and instead emphasize developing a Just Culture that encourages the acceptance of responsibility under collective accountability. Finally, the healthcare field should work to be more patient focused, with patients at the center of care and decision-making. Medical error presents a real and deep concern for patients and their families. Reducing the widespread effects of medical error will require a multidisciplinary approach extending to fields far beyond medicine, and even the law, to see real change
Syntax of Sports Class 6: Drafting and Editing
Get PDFHow do you start a piece of writing? How do you edit one? And what can be done to combat those pesky—and paralyzing—feelings of perfectionism that often derail our most important sentences and paragraphs?
This sixth volume of the Syntax of Sports series creatively uses the language of baseball, football, tennis, and many other sports to explore these questions. Based on a popular course at the University of Michigan, it captures the energy, originality, and discipline - crossing insights that make its author, Professor Patrick Barry, such a sought-after teacher and presenter.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1125/thumbnail.jp
Labor Law, Ownership, and the Firm
Get PDFLabor law has its own working theory of the business firm, not derivable from another area of law. This theory of the firm, which the affirmative provisions of labor law are taken to both modify and preserve, is more overtly hierarchical than in other areas. This is true across the main functional domains of labor law: union formation; expressive and associational rights; and the scope of collective bargaining. A rich vein of existing scholarship deals with both hierarchy and deference to property within labor law. The arguments of this essay emerge from considering these aspects of labor law in conjunction with broader ideas about the firm. The essay shows that labor law\u27s theory of the firm does not follow straightforwardly from generally accepted ideas about corporate property and is in fact in tension with them. It also sets out how the coordination rights granted to workers by labor law are systematically inferior in quality to the analogous rights granted by incorporation, as well as being derivative of firm-based economic coordination more generally. Finally, the essay briefly revisits the ur-text of modern corporate governance, authored by New Deal liberals Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, and surfaces the implicit premises about labor relations contained therein. Specifically, Berle and Means read a similarly hierachical picture of the work relationship (an unrealistic one) into the historical snapshot of the firm and of property relations that effectively serves as the normative benchmark for their affirmative view. This ultimately functioned to narrow questions of enterprise governance to largely exclude workers, setting the stage for later developments that would do so even more explicitly, while questions of workers\u27 role in the enterprise were now cordoned-off within labor law
The Profit Principle: Tracing the Moral Decline of Corporate Law Firms
Get PDFA review of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice. By David Enrich
Gender Identity and Birth Certificates: The Surrogacy Nexus
Get PDFThis Article confronts and responds to the weaponization of birth certificates in recent controversies around gender identity by drawing parallels between gender identity and intentional parentage. A juxtaposition of gender identity with parentage identity reveals that they share the common underpinning of self-identification, raising the question why birth certificates are permitted to reflect one’s parentage identity but, as has been suggested in numerous controversies involving transgender litigants, not one’s gender identity. This Article argues that, for the same reasons that a surrogacy arrangement permits the parties to it to define for themselves who are the legal parents of the child they plan to create, a gender marker on a birth certificate should also be a matter of self-definition. This Article emphasizes that basing a law of gender determination on inflexible categories defined by outward anatomical differences furthers no defensible public policy and indeed is in direct conflict with evolving understandings of gender and human rights
Impossibility of Artificial Inventors
Get PDFRecently, the United Kingdom Supreme Court decided that only natural persons can be considered inventors. A year before, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a similar decision. In fact, so have many the courts all over the world. This Article analyses these decisions, argues that the courts got it right, and finds that artificial inventorship is at odds with patent law doctrine, theory, and philosophy. The Article challenges the intellectual property (IP) post-humanists, exposing the analytical and normative perils of their argumentation, and recommends against getting rid of the nominally central place of humans in the law. This response to IP post-humanism rests in equal measure on patent doctrine, legal causation, and the mythology which creates and justifies the law
Gendered Peace Through International Law
Get PDFTwo leading feminist lawyers reflect on gender in international law to set out what a gendered peace might look like and its impact on international law in this open access book.
In order to challenge orthodoxies, the book takes an unconventional approach, merging personal reflections, expert essays, and interviews. It throws the disciplinary net wide, drawing on international law, gender studies, international relations and history. The authors, undisputed global leaders in the field, challenge the reader to unlearn international law, in order to relearn it in a way that makes it more fit for purpose in the contemporary world. This seminal work is a clarion call to think about international law in a new and transformative way.https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1128/thumbnail.jp