Law Commons^™

Sacred Children, Taboo Tradeoffs, And Distorted Discourses, Sean Hannon Williams

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article brings together three literatures—bioethics, psychological research on taboo tradeoffs, and family law—to reveal pervasive distortions in current family law scholarship and judicial reasoning. Empirical work in bioethics shows that child welfare occupies a unique moral sphere. People routinely resist making tradeoffs between spheres. Just as sacrificing adult lives for money is taboo, so too is sacrificing child welfare for adult welfare. When faced with the prospect of these tradeoffs, people engage in a predictable set of avoidance and moral mitigation strategies. Across five case studies, this Article shows how child welfare has talismanic qualities which, even in the …

Cloning People: A Jewish Law Analysis Of The Issues, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

This Article is an attempt to create a preliminary and tentative analysis of the technology of cloning from a Jewish law perspective. Like all preliminary analyses, it is designed not to advance a rule that represents itself as definitive normative Jewish law, but rather an attempt to outline some of the issues in the hope that others will focus on the problems and analysis found in this Article and will sharpen or correct that analysis. Such is the way that Jewish law seeks truth.

In the case of cloning-as with all advances in reproductive technology- the Jewish tradition is betwixt …