Law Commons^™

A Woman’S Worth, Kimberly D. Krawiec

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines three traditionally “taboo trades”: (1) the sale of sex, (2) compensated egg donation, and (3) commercial surrogacy. The Article purposely invokes examples in which the compensated provision of goods or services (primarily or exclusively by women) is legal, but in which commodification is only partially achieved or is constrained in some way. I argue that incomplete commodification disadvantages female providers in these instances, by constraining their agency, earning power, or status. Moreover, anticommodification and coercion rhetoric is sometimes invoked in these settings by interest groups who, at best, have little interest in female empowerment and, at worst, …

He's Gotta Have It, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In 1929, James Thurber and E.B. White observed that

[d]uring the past year, two factors in our civilization have been greatly overemphasized. One is aviation. The other is sex.... In the case of aviation, persons interested in the sport saw that the problem was to simplify it and make it seem safe.... With sex, the opposite was true.... The problem in this case was to make sex seem more complex and dangerous. This task was taken up by sociologists, analysts, gynecologists, psychologists, and authors.... They joined forces and made the whole matter of sex complicated beyond [our wildest dreams].... Sex, …

Seasoned To The Use, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

Two recent novels, Presumed Innocent and The Good Mother, have more in common than critical success, longevity on best-seller lists and big-name movie adaptations. Both books are about law: Presumed Innocent is a tale of murder in the big city; The Good Mother is the story of a custody fight over a little girl. Central characters in both books are lawyers. Turow is a lawyer, and Miller thanks lawyers. While the books could be classified in other ways – Presumed Innocent as mystery, The Good Mother as women's fiction – each meets a suggested genre specification of a legal novel: …