The Faculty Lounge

Taboo Trades Podcast: International Surrogacy with Stephen Wilkinson

My guest for this episode is Lancaster University professor Stephen Wilkinson and I’m joined by two UVA Law 3L co-hosts, Makenna Cherry and Meghana Puchalapalli. Wilkinson is a Professor of Bioethics, Associate Dean for Research for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Chair of the University Research Ethics Committee.

Much of his work is about reproductive ethics and the regulation of reproductive technologies, especially the ethics of selective reproduction. A book on this topic (Choosing Tomorrow’s Children, Oxford University Press) was published in 2010. Since then, particular interests have included ethical issues raised by uterus transplantation, non-invasive pre-natal testing, mitochondrial replacement, new sources of eggs and sperm, genome editing, surrogacy, and public funding for infertility treatment.

Another abiding interest is the commercial exploitation of the human body, which was the subject of his first book, Bodies for Sale (Routledge, 2003), which we discuss in this episode, together with his 2016 article, Exploitation in international paid surrogacy arrangements, which appeared in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.

 

 

Professor Stephen Wilkinson Bio, Lancaster University: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/ppr/people/stephen-wilkinson

 

Exploitation in international paid surrogacy arrangements
Wilkinson, S. 05/2016 In: Journal of Applied Philosophy. 33, 2, p. 125-145

 

Bodies for sale: ethics and exploitation in the human body trade
Wilkinson, S. 2003 New York : Routledge. 248 p. ISBN: 9780415266253 .

Taboo Trades Podcast: Mary Anne Case on A Post-Dobbs Right to F*$#

In today’s episode, UVA Law 3Ls Reidar Composano and Bryan Blaylock join me to continue our discussion with University of Chicago Law professor, Mary Anne Case, about her forthcoming paper, Donorsexuality. The f-bomb is dropped (but for reasons relevant to the paper) and I emphasize (again) that all this Con Law talk is not welcome on my podcast. No one listens to me. 

 

 

Case litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was professor of law and Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia before joining the Chicago Law School faculty. Her scholarship has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and family; and the early history of feminism.

Mary Anne Case faculty bio: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/case

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Donorsexuality with Mary Anne Case

University of Chicago Law professor, Mary Anne Case, joins me and UVA Law 3Ls Reidar Composano and Bryan Blaylock to discuss her forthcoming paper, Donorsexuality. The f-bomb is dropped (but for reasons relevant to the paper) and I emphasize (again) that all this Con Law talk is not welcome on my podcast. No one listens to me.

 

 

Case litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was professor of law and Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia before joining the Chicago Law School faculty. Her scholarship has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and family; and the early history of feminism.

Mary Anne Case faculty bio: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/case

Taboo Trades Podcast: Peterson on Prisons, Part II

Jonathan Peterson and I continue our discussion of prisons, commodification, and privatization, together with UVA Law 3Ls Ryan Fitzgerald and Mary Talkington.  Peterson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola New Orleans and the paper we’re discussing is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook on Commodification, edited by Elodie Bertrand and Vida Panitch. (As mentioned in the last episode, I have a chapter in the Handbook as well) 

Jonathan’s research specializations are in philosophy of law and political philosophy. His current research focuses on political authority, social justice, criminal law, and punishment. 

Jonathan’s paper is an important read for anyone interested in prison reform. We hope you enjoy this final portion of our discussion.

 

 

Jonathan Peterson's webpage at Loyola New Orleans: http://cas.loyno.edu/philosophy/bios/jonathan-peterson 

Taboo Trades Podcast: Prisons, Commodification, & Privatization with Jonathan Peterson

In this episode, I'm joined by UVA Law 3Ls Ryan Fitzgerald and Mary Talkington to interview Jonathan Peterson, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola New Orleans, about commodification and privatization in prisons. The paper we’re discussing is forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook on Commodification, edited by Elodie Bertrand and Vida Panitch. 

Jonathan’s research specializations are in philosophy of law and political philosophy. His current research focuses on political authority, social justice, criminal law, and punishment. 

Jonathan Peterson's webpage at Loyola New Orleans: http://cas.loyno.edu/philosophy/bios/jonathan-peterson

 

 

Common Law Season 5 launches with Taboo Trades

My dean, Risa Goluboff, and colleague, Cathy Hwang, launch the fifth season of the podcast “Common Law” by interviewing me about my courses (including a new course, Blood Feud, taught with Peter Jaworski), my podcast (the Taboo Trades podcast), and my recent paper, “Markets, Repugnance and Externalities,” published in the Journal of Institutional Economics this summer. I have no idea how these two busy and productive women fit time for me into their busy schedules, but I’m very glad that they did. The episode was a lot of fun.

 

Common Law · S5 E1: Taboo Trades

Here’s a description of the Common Law podcast, a production of the University of Virginia School of Law:

Though much divides us these days, there are still some things we all share in common. One of them is law. From the kind of health care we receive to the laws that determine what’s a ticket and what’s a court date, law is everywhere. “Common Law” gives insight into the laws around us and what’s next. This season, Dean Risa Goluboff hosts with “Co-Counsel” Danielle Citron, John Harrison, Cathy Hwang and Greg Mitchell, who are also UVA Law professors. Transcripts are posted at commonlawpodcast.com.

Taboo Trades Podcast: Breach By Violence with Brittany Farr, Part II

In this episode, UVA Law 3L Marley Peters and I continue our discussion with Brittany Farr, Assistant Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. We’re discussing her article, Breach By Violence, which is forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review. It analyzes the use of private law by sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South to address violent breaches of contract by landlords. To hear the full interview, make sure to also listen to the prior episode, Episode 3.

 

Farr is a scholar of private law and race. With more than a decade of interdisciplinary training, her research draws on history, legal theory, and cultural studies to theorize how marginalized populations have availed themselves of otherwise inhospitable legal regimes. In particular, her research focuses on enslaved and free African Americans’ use of contract law during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interrogates the ways in which contract law mediated African Americans’ relationship to bodily autonomy, economic freedom, and legal agency both during and after slavery. 

 

 

Brittany Farr NYU Homepage: https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=57053

 

Interview with Samuel James (S. J.) and Leonia Farrar, May 28, 2003. 
Interview K-0652. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/playback.html?base_file=K-0652&duration=01:29:20

 

Oral history with 84 year old black female, Joiner, Arkansas https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000030

Taboo Trades Podcast: Breach By Violence—Sharecropper Litigation with Brittany Farr

In this episode, UVA Law 3L Marley Peters and I interview Brittany Farr, Assistant Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Farr is a scholar of private law and race. With more than a decade of interdisciplinary training, her research draws on history, legal theory, and cultural studies to theorize how marginalized populations have availed themselves of otherwise inhospitable legal regimes. In particular, her research focuses on enslaved and free African Americans’ use of contract law during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interrogates the ways in which contract law mediated African Americans’ relationship to bodily autonomy, economic freedom, and legal agency both during and after slavery. 

We’re discussing her article, Breach By Violence, forthcoming in the UCLA Law Review, which analyzes the use of private law by sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South to address violent breaches of contract by landlords. 

 

 

Brittany Farr NYU Homepage: https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=57053

Interview with Samuel James (S. J.) and Leonia Farrar, May 28, 2003.
Interview K-0652. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007). https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/playback.html?base_file=K-0652&duration=01:29:20

Oral history with 84 year old black female, Joiner, Arkansas https://www.loc.gov/item/afccal000030

Taboo Trades Podcast: Indentured Servitude, Specific Performance, and the Thirteenth Amendment with Nate Oman

In this episode, we continue our discussion with Nathan B. Oman, the W. Taylor Reveley III Research Professor and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Markets at William & Mary School of Law. Nate specializes in Contract Law, the Economic Analysis of Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Religion, and Legal History. Today, we’re discussing his 2009 article, Specific Performance and the Thirteenth Amendment, published in the Minnesota Law Review.

As I mentioned in episode 1, the article first came to my attention this summer, when the internet erupted with suggestions that the specific performance clause in the Elon Musk (more precisely, X Holdings) merger agreement with Twitter wasn’t enforceable because of the 13^th Amendment. As you heard in our last episode, Nate strongly disagrees with that take.

I’ve split my discussion with Nate into two parts. In Episode 1, largely driven by questions from UVA Law 3Ls Bridget Boyd and Jenn Scoler, we discussed the Musk-Twitter litigation and the various provisions of the merger agreement, including the specific performance provision and the termination fee. In this episode, we delve more deeply into Nate’s analysis of the scope of the 13^th amendment’s prohibition against indentured servitude and its relation to the specific performance of personal service contracts. As always, we spend some time on examples from the world of sports . . . because hey, we’re in Virginia.

 

 

Links:

Nathan B. Oman faculty bio https://law2.wm.edu/faculty/bios/fulltime/nboman.php

 

Nathan B. Oman, Specific Performance and the Thirteenth Amendment, 93 MINN. L. REV. 2020 (2009). https://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Oman_MLR.pdf

 

Amendment and Plan of Merger by and among X Holdings I, Inc., X Holdings II, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. dated as of April 25, 2022 https://kimberlydkrawiec.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Musk-Twitter-Agreement.pdf

Taboo Trades Podcast: Specific Performance, Twitter, and Elon Musk with Nate Oman

In this episode, UVA Law 3Ls Bridget Boyd and Jenn Scoler join me to interview Nathan B. Oman, the W. Taylor Reveley III Research Professor and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Markets at William & Mary School of Law. Nate specializes in Contract Law, the Economic Analysis of Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Religion, and Legal History. Today, we’re discussing his 2009 article, Specific Performance and the Thirteenth Amendment, published in the Minnesota Law Review.

The article first came to my attention this summer, when the internet erupted with suggestions that the specific performance clause in the Elon Musk (more precisely, X Holdings) merger agreement with Twitter wasn’t enforceable because of the 13^thAmendment. As you’ll hear in this episode, Nate is having none of that.

I’ve split my discussion with Nate into two parts. In this Part, largely driven by questions from Bridget and Jenn, we discuss the Musk-Twitter litigation and the various provisions of the merger agreement, including the specific performance provision and the termination fee. If you’re covering that litigation in class this year, in my completely and wholly unbiased view :-), the episode makes a really nice introduction for students to some of the issues.

 

 

Links:

Nathan B. Oman faculty bio https://law2.wm.edu/faculty/bios/fulltime/nboman.php

 

Nathan B. Oman, Specific Performance and the Thirteenth Amendment, 93 MINN. L. REV. 2020 (2009). https://www.minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Oman_MLR.pdf

 

Amendment and Plan of Merger by and among X Holdings I, Inc., X Holdings II, Inc. and Twitter, Inc. dated as of April 25, 2022 https://kimberlydkrawiec.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Musk-Twitter-Agreement.pdf

Taboo Trades Returns for Season 3

Welcome to Season 3 of the Taboo Trades podcast! Hear more about this year's topics and guests and listen to UVA Law students introduce themselves and talk about why they're taking time out of their busy law school schedules to produce this podcast with me.

This year's co-hosts are: Bryan Blaylock, Bridget Boyd, Makenna Cherry, Reider Compasano, Ryan Fitzgerald, Rahima Ghafoori, Caroline Gozigian, Marley Peters, Meghana Puchalapalli, Jennifer Scoler, and Mary Talkington

 

 

 

Taboo Trades Bonus Episode: Ending the Kidney Shortage with Frank McCormick

Frank McCormick is an economist and the author of numerous articles focused on the shortage of kidneys for transplantation. He is retired from the Bank of America where he was Vice-president and Director of U.S. Economic and Financial Research. Today, we’re discussing his recent article, Projecting the Economic Impact of Compensating Living Kidney Donors in the United States: Cost-Benefit Analysis Demonstrates Substantial Patient and Societal Gains, co-authored with Philip J. Held, Glenn Chertow, Thomas G. Peters, and John P. Roberts. It is published in the journal, Value in Health and is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109830152201957X/

The Plagiarism Taboo with Brian Frye

A new bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast is up and it is a lot of fun.

My guest is one of the most unusual and creative voices in the legal academy, Brian Frye, the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. He teaches classes in civil procedure, intellectual property, copyright, and nonprofit organizations, as well as a seminar on law and popular culture. Today we’re engaging in academic navel gazing and opining on plagiarism, law review publishing, and scholarly shit posting.

Brian is also a filmmaker. He produced the documentary Our Nixon (2013), which was broadcast by CNN and opened theatrically nationwide. His short films and videos have shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among other venues, and are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His critical writing on film and art has appeared in October, The New Republic, Film Comment, Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, and Incite! among other journals.

Professor Frye also produces a podcast that I highly recommend, Ipse Dixit https://shows.pippa.io/ipse-dixit

 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast Bonus Episode: Taboo Children with Sean Williams

Hello everyone and welcome to the first bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast!

As regular listeners know, I’ve sadly had to say goodbye to the amazing group of students who were my co-hosts for Season 2. But I decided to do a couple of bonus episodes this summer, and this is the first, featuring Sean Williams of the University of Texas School of Law. I also have a very special co-host, one of my favorite colleagues at UVA Law, Gregg Strauss.

Sean Williams studies decision making dynamics in a wide variety of areas including marriage markets, parental investments in child safety, jury damage awards, and consumer contracts. He writes widely on Family Law, Tort Theory, and Behavioral Law and Economics. Today we’re discussing his new working paper, “Sacred Children and Taboo Tradeoffs,” which is downloadable from SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4163131

Gregg Strauss is with me at the University of Virginia school of law. He is both a lawyer and a philosopher, and studies the limits of legitimate law in situations of fundamental disagreement, with an emphasis on familial relationships.

 

Kidneys For Sale in Iran: Market Design Blog

Via Al Roth's Market Design Blog:

Just published in Transplant International (which is the journal of the European Society for Organ Transplantation), is a paper describing the Iranian market for kidneys in the city of Mashad, and three commentaries on it.  

 Here's the original paper:

Kidneys for Sale: Empirical Evidence From Iran  by Tannaz Moeindarbari and Mehdi Feizi

And here are three short commentaries.

Kidneys for Sale? A Commentary on Moeindarbari’s and Feizi’s Study on the Iranian Model  by Frederike Ambagtsheer1, Sean Columb, Meteb M. AlBugami, and Ninoslav Ivanovski

Kidneys for Sale: Are We There Yet? (Commentary on Kidneys for Sale: Empirical Evidence From Iran) by Kyle R. Jackson, Christine E. Haugen, and Dorry L. Segev

Criminal, Legal, and Ethical Kidney Donation and Transplantation: A Conceptual Framework to Enable Innovation  by Alvin E. Roth, Ignazio R. Marino, Kimberly D. Krawiec and Michael A. Rees

***********

The commentary by Roth, Marino, Krawiec and Rees contrasts the legal Iranian market with the dangerous black markets that operate elsewhere, outside of regular medical institutions.

Here's a recent long article that pulls together much of the discussion on compensation for donors and on sale of kidneys and transplant black markets:

Organ Trafficking, Can the illicit trade be stopped? By Sarah Glazer,  CQ Researcher, June 24, 2022 – Volume 32, Issue 22

HT: Frank McCormick

 

Getting Away with Taboo Trades with Gabriel Rossman, Pt. 2

Welcome to part 2 of my interview with Gabriel Rossman, Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.  We continue our discussion of sex, drugs, and Islamic finance, among other taboo trades. 

It’s also our final episode of season 2. Please listen to the end of the episode for a special goodbye from America’s favorite law students. Thank you to Gabriel for helping us wrap up this season with a great episode. And thanks to all of you for listening. 

 

Getting Away With Taboo Trades With Gabriel Rossman, Pt. 1

Want to buy sex, bribe a politician, or get your dumb kid into an Ivy League school? I discuss how to get away with taboo trades with Gabriel Rossman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and my co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.

Rossman studies cultural industries (such as radio and film) and economic sociology (including diffusion and disreputable exchange). He is interested in how people structure immoral exchanges like bribery to make them more subtle and therefore less obviously immoral.

I’ve been an admirer of Rossman’s work for a number of years and was so happy to have this opportunity to talk to him about his research that I kept him longer than normal and have divided his podcast into two parts. In this part, we talk about sugar babies, college admissions, Bill Cosby, and Islamic finance. We also discuss a forthcoming book manuscript on the obfuscation of disreputable exchange that Gabriel generously shared, currently titled “How to Get Away With Paying Bribes, Buying Sex, and Selling Corpses.

 

 

Suggested Readings

· “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional.” 2018. (with Oliver Schilke) American Sociological Review.

· “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.” 2014. Sociological Theory.

· “The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy.” 2014. Sociological Science.

· Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton University Press. 2012.

Kidneys with Sally Satel

I discuss what it's like to need (and receive) a life-saving kidney transplant with AEI's Sally Satel (a two-time kidney transplant patient) and UVA 3L, Caitlyn Stollings, who co-hosts this episode.

Dr. Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the staff psychiatrist at a local methadone clinic in Washington D.C. She was also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993 and remains a lecturer at Yale.

Importantly for our purposes, she is a two-time kidney transplant patient and has written widely about that experience. Dr. Satel is also the editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors

 

 

This episode features a kidney recipient, but we've also done two episodes featuring Good Samaritan donors, here:

and here:

Taboo Trades Podcast: Marijuana Legalization with Douglas Berman

 

 

I discuss marijuana legalization and why Congress is so incompetent, with Ohio State's Douglas Berman and UVA Law 3L, Cortney Inman, my co-host for this episode.

Douglas Berman is the Newton D. Baker-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law, and the Executive Director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. His principal teaching and research focus is criminal law and sentencing, and marijuana law and policy.

Professor Berman is the co-author of two casebooks. Sentencing Law and Policy and Marijuana Law and Policy. He has served as an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter for more than a decade and is the sole creator and author of the widely-read and widely-cited blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, which now receives nearly 100,000 page views per month and was the first blog ever cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Recommended Reading:

Drug Enforcement and Policy Center: Marijuana Reform Focus Area
https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/faculty-and-research/drug-enforcement-and-policy-center/marijuana-reform

Joanna Lampe, Congressional Research Service, Does the President Have the Power to Legalize Marijuana? (Nov. 4, 2021), at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10655

Jennifer Le, Federal Cannabis Reform – Is 2022 the Year?, National Law Review (Feb 11, 2022), at
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/federal-cannabis-reform-2022-year

Hailey Fuchs & Natalie Fertig, Big Weed is on the brink of scoring big political wins. So where are they?. Politico, Jan. 22, 2022, at https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/22/big-weed-brink-scoring-political-wins-527604

Douglas Berman & Alex Kreit, Marijuana Law & Policy Casebook https://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Law-Policy-Douglas-Berman/dp/1531010377

This is actually our second episode on marijuana legalization, so if you like this episode you should listen to this one from last season with Pat Oglesby

 

 

Taboo Trades Podcast: College Sports with Paul Haagen

With the Final Four nearly upon us, I discuss the future of college sports with Paul Haagen of Duke University and UVA Law 3L, Jackson Bailey.

Paul is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy at Duke University. His principal academic interests are contracts, the social history of law, and law and sports.

Recommended Reading:

Sports in the Courts: The NCAA and the Future of Intercollegiate Revenue Sports, 103 Judicature 54-61 (2019)