Legal Commentary

Thank you very much for the warm welcome, Dan.  I'm very happy to be joining Prawfs for this month. 

I am writing tonight from Champaign, IL, where I attending the Big 10 Aspiring Scholars Conference, a very helpful gathering where untenured professors as well as VAPS, fellows, and others seeking to join the legal academy can share works in progress.  The hospitality of the University of Illinois (with special thanks to Christine Hurt and Larry Solum) makes this event a true pleasure to attend.  This year I feel an especially pressing need for such a conference.  At Indiana, I teach torts, a death penalty seminar, and a lecture course entitled "Reproduction, Childhood, and the Law."  My scholarship broadly focuses on law and emotion, and to date my most significant scholarly contributions have been in researching the effects of attending capital trials and executions on murder victims' family members.  To obtain my Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, I interviewed victim's families and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing as to the effects of advocacy group membership, trial attendance and participation, and attendance at McVeigh's execution upon their healing process.  This research has provided the foundation for three law review articles and a forthcoming book from New York University Press (which is my major project for this year). 

However, this summer I have switched gears and begun to write in the area of assisted reproductive technology (ART) as well.  In the weeks to come, I will be blogging about my first foray into this subject matter, an article examining the implications of how legal scholarship constructs infertile women undergoing ART procedures, particularly in the contexts of informed consent and embryo disposition.  Hopefully the intersection of ART and the law will prove "fertile" ground for research.  For this reason, I am particularly eager to hear what my colleagues have to say about my article draft, and doubly eager to complete the bulk of the revision work before October, when I will be in what Dan (quite accurately) termed "survival mode" due to the impending birth of our daughter.  My husband and I are "old hands" at the baby game; we have three boys who will all turn two in September, and so we like to joke that we already have 6 years of parenting experience.  After all, what is one more?  And don't small children count towards tenure requirements?