Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Law
Floating Lungs: Forensic Science In Self-Induced Abortion Prosecutions, Aziza Ahmed
Floating Lungs: Forensic Science In Self-Induced Abortion Prosecutions, Aziza Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
Pregnancy that ends in stillbirth or late miscarriage—particularly where a person gives birth outside of a hospital—raises the specter of criminal behavior. To successfully prosecute a person for the death of a child, however, requires proving that the child was born alive. Prosecutors mobilize forensic science as an objective way to determine life. This Essay focuses on one such forensic method: the hydrostatic lung test (“HLT”), also known as the floating lung test (“FLT”). Although there are debates about the “correct” way to perform the exam, in essence, the test requires that a forensic scientist take pieces of the lung …
When Pregnancy Is An Injury: Rape, Law, And Culture, Khiara M. Bridges
When Pregnancy Is An Injury: Rape, Law, And Culture, Khiara M. Bridges
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines criminal statutes that grade more severely sexual assaults that result in pregnancy. These laws, which define pregnancy as a “substantial bodily injury,” run directly counter to positive constructions of pregnancy within culture. The fact that the criminal law, in this instance, reflects this negative, subversive understanding of pregnancy creates the possibility that this idea may be received within culture as a construction of pregnancy that is as legitimate as positive understandings. In this way, these laws create possibilities for the reimagining of pregnancy within law and society. Moreover, these laws recall the argumentation that proponents of abortion …
Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik
Pain As Fact And Heuristic: How Pain Neuroimaging Illuminates Moral Dimensions Of Law, Amanda C. Pustilnik
Faculty Scholarship
Legal statuses, prohibitions, and protections often turn on the presence and degree of physical pain. In legal domains ranging from tort to torture, pain and its degree do important definitional work by delimiting boundaries of lawfulness and of entitlements. The omnipresence of pain in law suggests that the law embodies an intuition about the ontological primacy of pain. Yet, for all the work done by pain as a term in legal texts and practice, it has had a confounding lack of external verifiability. As with other subjective states, we have been able to impute pain’s presence but have not been …
Criminal Abortion Revisited, Samuel W. Buell
Criminal Abortion Revisited, Samuel W. Buell
Faculty Scholarship
This note focuses on the issue of the state's application of the criminal law as a sanction against women who choose to have abortions. History reveals that pre-Roe criminal-abortion law-both by its terms and in its application-expressed an incoherent attitude toward the culpability of these women. While criminal-abortion laws treated the abortionist as a serious felon, sending him to prison for up to twenty years,' the same statutes either did not cover the woman seeking an abortion, or, if the statutes did deem her a criminal, prosecutors and courts refused or neglected to hold her liable criminally. The law instead …