Medical Jurisprudence Commons^™

How Medicalization Of Civil Rights Could Disappoint, Allison K. Hoffman

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This essay reflects on Craig Konnoth’s recent Article, Medicalization and the New Civil Rights, which is a carefully crafted and thought-provoking description of the refashioning of civil rights claims into medical rights frameworks. He compellingly threads together many intellectual traditions—from antidiscrimination law to disability law to health law—to illustrate the pervasiveness of the phenomenon that he describes and why it might be productive as a tool to advance civil rights.

This response, however, offers several reasons why medicalization may not cure all that ails civil rights litigation’s pains and elaborates on the potential risks of overinvesting in medical rights-seeking. …

Health Insurance, Employment, And The Human Genome: Genetic Discrimination And Biobanks In The United States, Eric A. Feldman, Chelsea Darnell

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Does genetic information warrant special legal protection, and if so how should it be protected? This essay examines the most recent (and indeed only) significant effort by the US government to prohibit genetic discrimination, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). We argue that the legislation is unlikely to have the positive impact sought by advocates of genetic privacy and proponents of biobanks. In part, GINA disappoints because it does too little. Hailed by its promoters as “the first civil rights act of the 21^st century,” GINA’s reach is in fact quite modest and its grasp even more so. But …

The Social Context Of Oncofertility, Dorothy E. Roberts

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A field known as oncofertility provides female cancer patients with a variety of ways to preserve their fertility so that they may bear genetically related children after successful cancer treatment. Some women delay cancer therapy so doctors can collect their eggs, which are then cryopreserved in an unfertilized state or used to create embryos through in vitro fertilization for freezing. An experimental procedure for preserving the fertility of prepubertal girls, known as ovarian tissue cryopreservation, involves surgically removing their ovarian tissue and growing the immature eggs to a mature state so they can be frozen and stored until the girls …

Collateral Consequences, Genetic Surveillance, And The New Biopolitics Of Race, Dorothy E. Roberts

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This Article is part of a Howard Law Journal Symposium on “Collateral Consequences: Who Really Pays the Price for Criminal Justice?,” as well as my larger book project, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011). It considers state and federal government expansion of genetic surveillance as a collateral consequence of a criminal record in the context of a new biopolitics of race in America. Part I reviews the expansion of DNA data banking by states and the federal government, extending the collateral impact of a criminal record—in the form …

Preface To Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, And Big Business Re-Create Race In The Twenty-First Century, Dorothy E. Roberts

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Fatal Invention documents the emergence of a new biopolitics in the United States that relies on re-inventing race in biological terms using cutting-edge genomic science and biotechnologies. Some scientists are defining race as a biological category written in our genes, while the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries convert the new racial science into race-based products, such as race-specific medicines, ancestry tests, and DNA forensics, that incorporate false assumptions of racial difference at the genetic level. The genetic understanding of race calls for technological responses to racial disparities while masking the continuing impact of racism in a supposedly post-racial society. Instead, I …

What’S Wrong With Race-Based Medicine?, Dorothy E. Roberts

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This article is based on the 2010 Dienard Memorial Lecture on Law and Medicine at University of Minnesota and part of a larger book project, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (The New Press, 2011). In June 2005, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first pharmaceutical indicated for a specific race. Its racial label elicited three types of criticism – scientific, commercial, and political. I discuss the first two controversies en route to what I consider the main problem with race-based medicine – its political implications. By claiming that race, a …

Race, Gender, And Genetic Technologies: A New Reproductive Dystopia?, Dorothy E. Roberts

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No abstract provided.