The Faculty Lounge

Roland Fryer on Slavery

Roland Fryer had a very nice piece on slavery in the Wall Street Journal to mark Juneteenth. A small excerpt:

Slavery endured not only because society condoned it but also because, for slaveholders, it paid. Fogel and Engerman overturned the then-fashionable view that bondage was an economically backward form of racist exploitation, manned by an idle workforce that dragged the South down. Their data revealed a colder truth: For those who owned people, slavery was the most profitable and therefore most rational labor system on offer. Recognizing the profit calculus behind slavery doesn’t dilute its moral horror—it sharpens it. It exposes how market incentives can entrench inhumanity and how the lure of profit can eclipse compassion.

Read the whole thing here. HT: Al Roth

Imminent Death Donation

I’m joined today by two special guests to discuss an unusual and ethically complex type of organ donation – imminent death donation, or IDD. As you’ll hear Thao Galvan explain in the episode, organ donation currently has three standard types: living donation, donation after brain death (a type of deceased donation in which the patient is declared brain dead, and thus legally dead), and donation after circulatory death, or DCD. In DCD, a patient who is not brain dead is removed from life support, but the heart keeps beating. If it takes the patient more than roughly 90 minutes to die, the organs may not be usable. IDD, or imminent death donation, attempts to prevent that, by retrieving non-vital organs (usually a kidney) for donation prior to the removal of life support.

Thao Galvan is a transplant surgeon and professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. Kathy Osterrieder is a retired financial analyst, who came to this issue after attempting, unsuccessfully, to donate the organs of her late husband, Robert Osterrieder, after making the difficult decision to remove him from life support. It is another first for the Taboo Trades podcast – the first time in over five years of recording that I’ve been unable to hold back the tears, as Kathy talks about what the experience was like for her family.

 

 

Links

Host: Kimberly D. Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests:

Nhu Thao Nguyen Galvan, M.D., M.P.H., FACS, Associate Professor of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine

Kathleen Osterrieder, Donor Family Member in Spirit, Retired Financial Analyst

 

Reading:

The Difficult Ethics of Organ Donations From Living Donors, Wall St. J. (2016)

Let’s change the rules for organ donations — and save lives, Wash. Post (2019)

OPTN, Ethical considerations of imminent death donation white paper (2016)

Survey of public attitudes towards imminent death donation in the United States, Am. J. Transplant. (2020)

Teaching Skill and Age

Recently, I blogged about a touching story from Mark Tushnet in We Age But Our Students Remain Young. Over at PrawfsBlawg, Howard Wasserman provides a counterpoint:

This Atlantic piece has stuck with me since first published in 2019 (I blogged about it). The Atlantic website recirculated it in today's daily email. I will highlight the piece that captures teaching and the academic connection.

As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time. A study in The Journal of Higher Education showed that the oldest college professors in disciplines requiring a large store of fixed knowledge, specifically the humanities, tended to get evaluated most positively by students. This probably explains the professional longevity of college professors, three-quarters of whom plan to retire after age 65—more than half of them after 70, and some 15 percent of them after 80. (The average American retires at 61.) One day, during my first year as a professor, I asked a colleague in his late 60s whether he’d ever considered retiring. He laughed, and told me he was more likely to leave his office horizontally than vertically.

Our dean might have chuckled ruefully at this—college administrators complain that research productivity among tenured faculty drops off significantly in the last decades of their career. Older professors take up budget slots that could otherwise be used to hire young scholars hungry to do cutting-edge research. But perhaps therein lies an opportunity: If older faculty members can shift the balance of their work from research to teaching without loss of professional prestige, younger faculty members can take on more research.

Ironically, the move to vigorous post-tenure review since 2019 (most prominently at Florida schools) flies in the face of this six-year-old article's insight--a 60-year-old who has taught for 25 years cannot be as productive a scholar as a 40-year-old in her first decade of teaching, and schools should adjust job assignments, expectations, and evaluation accordingly. Post-tenure review potentially flattens that evolution.

Read the whole thing here. 

 

Playing Favorites

Rock Legends Keith Richards and Paul McCartney (among others) have occasionally listed their favorite songs and artists. Here are some of them:

Keith:

Paul:

Keith:

Paul:

Keith:

Both:

Keith:

Paul (for James Jamerson on bass):

Paul:

Keith:

Keith:

McCartney's omission of the Rolling Stones wasn't a snub. His list was limited to "underappreciated" artists, so the Stones obviously didn't qualify.

 

Was this Revolutionary War was Gay?

Was this Revolutionary War hero America’s first openly gay general?

Obviously. I thought that was clear.

MAID in New York

Over at his Market Design Blog, Al Roth has a couple of posts about New York's Medical Aid In Dying Law (links below), which has passed both the state assembly and senate. According to theNY Times:

"Eleven states and the District of Columbia have passed laws permitting so-called medical aid in dying. The practice is also available in several European countries and in Canada, which recently broadened its criteria to extend the option to people with incurable chronic illnesses and disabilities.

The bill in New York is written more narrowly and would apply only to people who have an incurable and irreversible illness, with six months or less to live. Proponents say that distinction is key.

“It isn’t about ending a person’s life, but shortening their death,” said State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Manhattan Democrat and one of the sponsors of the bill. It passed on Monday night by a vote of 35 to 27, mostly along partisan lines.

Links:

Roth: Medical aid in dying bill advances (controversially) in New York State

Roth: New York State senate passes medical aid in dying bill

Will New York Soon Make It Too Easy to Die?   By Madeleine Kearns

New York Moves to Allow Terminally Ill People to Die on Their Own Terms
by Grace Ashford

CFP: Mid-Atlantic Law and Society Meeting Seeks Paper, Roundtable, and Panel Proposals

This just in, with an extended submission deadline:

Call for Participation
Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association Conference

The Mid-Atlantic Law & Society Association (MALSA) will host a one-day conference at Ramapo College of New Jersey on Saturday, October 4th. After a hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, we look forward to reinitiating the conference, and we hope you will join us in building a regional network of sociolegal scholars.

We seek papers, panels, and roundtables across a range of law and society topics and disciplines. Proposals for individual papers and fully formed sessions are welcome. Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 250 words; panel proposals and roundtables should include a list of participants and a session abstract. The deadline for all proposals is July 11th, 2025.

Accepted papers will utilize a law and society framework, drawing on theoretical and empirical sociolegal scholarship. While presentations on any topic are welcome, we are especially interested in panels that focus on areas of current interest and controversy. At a time when the rule of law is being questioned and analyses centering diversity, equity, and inclusion are under attack, it is imperative that we foster space for conversations about the relationship of law to power, in/justice, and in/equity.

Accepted presenters will be notified by August 15th.

To submit a proposal, please click here.

We hope that this meeting will serve as an opportunity to build MALSA as an institution, including electing officers, and identifying a host institution and coordinating committee for the next conference.

Please direct inquiries (but not proposal submissions!) to: [email protected].

Happy Microsoft Contract Day!

To those who celebrate.

UNC's smart and hilarious John Coyle has a post over at the Transnational Litigation Blog on Microsoft Contract Day 2025, following up on posts from two and one years ago, and concluding that Microsoft's dispute resolution clause is "still a mess." 

The entire post is both informative and laugh-out-loud funny, but the Myanmar portion is particularly entertaining:

Reading the clause for Myanmar is like watching a traffic accident unfold in real time. It appears that Microsoft took an arbitration clause calling for the resolution of all disputes in Singapore [A] and then grafted on the litigation terms set forth in the 2025 version of its standard clause [B]. The graft was, moreover, poorly executed. The drafter accidentally included the header of the patched language in the clause and placed it in the middle of a sentence, as shown in the bolded text below. . . .

It goes without saying that a clause that simultaneously calls for the arbitration of all disputes in one location and the litigation of all disputes in a different location is not a model to emulate. It also goes without saying that memo headings should not appear in contract clauses.

Read the whole thing here. 

Private Equity Eyes College Sports

According to Axios, "Private equity keeps inching closer to college sports, and now has a bit more certainty around its modeling." They're referring, of course, to the multibillion-dollar legal settlement formally approved just recently. Per ESPN:

Judge Claudia Wilken approved the deal between the NCAA, its most powerful conferences and lawyers representing all Division I athletes. The House v. NCAA settlement ends three separate federal antitrust lawsuits, all of which claimed the NCAA was illegally limiting the earning power of college athletes. . . .

The NCAA will pay nearly $2.8 billion in back damages over the next 10 years to athletes who competed in college at any time from 2016 through present day. Moving forward, each school can pay its athletes up to a certain limit. The annual cap is expected to start at roughly $20.5 million per school in 2025-26 and increase every year during the decade-long deal. These new payments are in addition to scholarships and other benefits the athletes already receive.

According to Axios, while not "a game changer" (due to media rights being negotiated at the conference level), the settlement nonetheless provides economic clarity: 

Particularly in better understanding the haves and have-nots, as only a relatively small handful of colleges are likely to spend up to the $20.5 million limit.
Expect a lot of private investment to help finance new facilities and develop luxe fan experiences. Similar to an expanded investment partnership announced yesterday — albeit negotiated prior to the settlement approval — between sports and entertainment agency Elevate, Velocity Capital Management, and the Texas Permanent School Fund.

To hear about predicted changes in the NCAA from sports law and industry expert, Marc Edelman, listen to this wonderful episode recorded last year:

 

 

Revisiting My Body, My Choice

Yesterday's post on the latest episode of The Taboo Trades Podcast, Exploitation Creep: Feminism, Sex, and Reproduction in International Law, reminded me of a prior episode with George Mason's Ilya Somin. In fact, I give a shout out to him at the end of the episode, noting that he has advocated for exactly the type of "my body, my choice" cross-ideological political coalition that the panelists are urging. Listen to Exploitation Creep here, and My Body, My Choice below. 

 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Exploitation Creep

Welcome to a very special bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast! Today I have a record number of guests – five in total—continuing a discussion that we began at Yale’s Newman Colloquium earlier this summer. We discuss exploitation and trafficking in international human rights law, especially in the context of reproductive and sexual labor. You’ll hear more about that colloquium and that conversation during the podcast. Each guest introduces themselves at the start of the podcast, but you can also read their full bios and a reading list in the show notes.

 

Host: Kim Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests:

Janie Chuang, Professor of Law, American University, Washington College of Law

Dina Francesca Haynes, Executive Director, Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights; Lecturer in Law (spring term), and Research Scholar in Law, Yale University

Joanne Meyerowitz, Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and Professor of American Studies, Yale University

Alice M. Miller, Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Law and Co-Director, Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale University

Mindy Jane Roseman, Director of International Law Programs and Director of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights, Yale University

Reading List:

Janie A. Chuang

• "Preventing trafficking through new global governance over labor migration."  St. UL Rev.36 (2019): 1027.
• “Exploitation Creep And The Unmaking Of Human Trafficking Law.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 108, no. 4, 2014, pp. 609–49. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5305/amerjintelaw.108.4.0609 . Accessed 13 June 2025.

Dina Haynes

• "Used, abused, arrested and deported: Extending immigration benefits to protect the victims of trafficking and to secure the prosecution of traffickers." Human Rights Quarterly2 (2004): 221-272. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/168121
• "Client-centered human rights advocacy." Clinical L. Rev.13 (2006): 379.
• "Sacrificing women and immigrants on the altar of regressive politics." Human Rights Quarterly4 (2019): 777-822. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/735796

Kimberly D. Krawiec

• Repugnant Work (April 21, 2025). Forthcoming, Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Work (Julian Jonker and Grant Rozeboom, eds.), Available at SSRN:https://ssrn.com/abstract=5225038 
• “Markets, Repugnance, and Externalities.” Journal of Institutional Economics19, no. 6 (2023): 944–55. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137422000157 .

Joanne Meyerowitz

• How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002) https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013797
• “Transnational Sex and U.S. History,”American Historical Review 114:5 (December 2009), 1273-1286
• “A History of ‘Gender,’” American Historical Review113:5 (December, 2008), 1346-1356

Alice Miller

• Miller, Alice M., and Tara Zivkovic. "Orwellian rights and the UN Trafficking" Routledge Handbook of Human Trafficking. Routledge, 2017. 328-341.
• Miller, Alice M., and Mindy J. Roseman. "Sexual and reproductive rights at the United Nations: frustration or fulfilment?." Reproductive health matters38 (2011): 102-118.

 

Mindy Jane Roseman

• Miller, Alice M., and Mindy Jane Roseman, eds.Beyond virtue and vice: rethinking human rights and criminal law. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
• Reichenbach, Laura, and Mindy Jane Roseman, eds. Reproductive health and human rights: the way forward. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Other Authors

EU Directive (2024 Amendment) on Combating Trafficking in Human Beings

 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1712/oj/eng

Elena Shih, Manufacturing Freedom: Trafficking Rescue, Rehabilitation, and the Slave-Free Good (University of California Press, 2023)

David Simon Named 2025 Health Law Scholar

Professor David Simon has been selected as a 2025 Health Law Scholar by the Center for Health Law Studies at Saint Louis University School of Law and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics (ASLME). He is one of only four scholars nationwide chosen to present their work at the prestigious Health Law Scholars Workshop, to be held in September. Read the full announcement here. Congrats to David!

 

nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

[image or embed]

— David A. Simon (@davidasimon.bsky.social) June 10, 2025 at 10:25 AM