Faculty Colloquia and Events

A conversation with David Pozen, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia University, on his new book “The Constitution of the War on Drugs” (Oxford University Press), with comments from Jennifer Laurin, William B. Bates Chair for the Administration of Justice at the University of Texas at Austin.

Guest: Tom Zur - S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: Over the past four years, three of the largest Latin American countries have made significant strides toward the decriminalization of abortion: Argentina in December 2020, Colombia in February 2022, and Mexico in September 2023. The changes are the result of strategic rights-based litigation, cultural work, and national and regional coalition building, largely on the part of feminists who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s. These feminists had long worked for incremental change, using the Courts as allies for reform. Contrasting their strategies with those deployed today by younger feminists in the region, who not only are more inclined to use social networks and direct action but are also more focused on issues of violence and individual harm, I argue for the need to bridge gaps between old and new feminisms to continue to work toward reproductive justice.

Isabel Cristina Jaramillo Sierra is Professor of Law and Director of the Jurisprudence Department at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She also acts as general coordinator of the Latin American Network of Feminist Legal Scholars- RED ALAS (www.redalas.net). She has written extensively on feminist legal reform and its impact on women, with particular attention to reforms related to quotas, abortion, and violence. Relevant works in English include “The New Colombian Law on Abortion" in International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (2022) and "Abortion Reform in Colombia: From Total Prohibition to Decriminalization up to Week Twenty-Four" in The South Atlantic Quarterly (2023). She has worked as a consultant for the National Government and the Judicial Branch on gender and human rights issues; served as an expert before the Congress of the Republic; and worked as an Ad Hoc Judge for the Constitutional Court and the State Council. In 2017, she was nominated (but not elected) by President Juan Manuel Santos to the Constitutional Court. She earned her S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an LL.B. with Honors from Universidad de los Andes.

Co-sponsored by Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and the Latin America Initiative at Texas Law

Drawing Board Luncheon: Charles Silver

Guest: Tamar Kricheli-Katz - Associate Professor of Law, Tel-Aviv University. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

A conversation with Andrea Scoseria Katz, Associate Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, on how the U.S. Constitution changes without an alteration to its text—and the costs to this form of constitutional change.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: President Trump’s harsh, exclusionary anti-immigrant policies were bolstered by rhetoric that demonized migrant pregnancy and motherhood. including tropes like “birth tourism,” “anchor baby,” “chain migration,” and “public charge.” The Obama and Biden administrations, in contrast, enacted and publicized policies excepting pregnant women from otherwise intensive immigration enforcement regimes, projecting an image of humanitarian concern. This paper uses critical feminist ethnography to study the impact of pregnancy-related immigration policies on the lived experiences of pregnant migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border from 2017-2022. It documents the impacts of a shifting landscape of exclusion, expulsion, deportation, detention, and release during an era of rapid migration policy change. The findings are clear: under every policy regime, pregnant women are negatively impacted. During periods characterized by increased detention, detention conditions are poor. During periods characterized by exclusion and expulsion, pregnant women are forced to wait in dangerous, precarious conditions in Northern Mexico, increasing the likelihood that they will attempt a perilous desert crossing into the United States. And during periods characterized by a greater chance of receiving humanitarian parole due to pregnancy, parole is seldom granted to partners and family members, making family separation inseparable from a supposedly humanitarian exception.

Amanda Heffernan is a nurse midwife and Assistant Professor at Seattle University College of Nursing, where she is also Clinical Placement Coordinator for the Midwifery Program. In addition, she is a Seattle University PACE (Partnership for Advancing Community Engagement) Fellow and a faculty fellow at the Seattle University Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture. Her research interests sit at the intersection of migration and reproductive justice, including the impact of detention on families and the experiences of pregnant migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. She is author of “Pregnancy in United States Immigration Detention: The Gendered Necropolitics of Reproductive Oppression” in International Feminist Journal of Politics. She received a Ph.D. in Nursing from the University of New Mexico, an MSN in Nurse-Midwifery from Frontier Nursing University, a B.S. in Nursing from the University of Washington, and a B.A. in History from Whitman College.

Guest: Andrew Hayashi - Law Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

Drawing Board Luncheon: Susan Morse

Drawing Board Luncheon: Karen Engle

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: This talk will present the preliminary findings of a national research study tracking prosecutions for pregnancy-related conduct in the first year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It will contextualize them within larger conversations about pregnancy criminalization and the relationships among victimhood, care, and punishment in U.S. criminal systems.

Wendy Bach is a Professor of Law and co-Director of the Appalachian Justice Research Center at the University of Tennessee College of Law. Her research focuses on the intersection of poverty law, criminal law, social welfare provision, law and society, and community lawyering. Professor Bach is the author of a number of law review articles and Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She is currently leading a national study of the criminalization of pregnancy in a post-Dobbs world. She received a J.D. from the New York University School of Law, as well as an M.A. and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Drawing Board Luncheon: Thomas McGarity

Guest: Sadia Farzana - Postdoctoral Scholar, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

Guest: Adi Leibovitch - Senior Lecturer, Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Law and Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

This speaker series considers the criminalization of reproduction—historical and contemporary, local and global—largely through the lens of reproductive justice.

RSVP

Abstract: In 2022, in Dobbs, the Court held that the Due Process Clause does not protect a right to abortion. Dobbs unleashed a tidal wave of old and new laws criminalizing abortion, including the Comstock Act of 1873, reviving a criminalization regime Roe had held in abeyance. But questions have arisen about the constitutionality of reviving regulations that were created at a time when women and people of color were not viewed as equal members of the polity. Reproductive justice advocates have argued that the revival of this regime violates equal protection law, and that even if due process no longer protects reproductive rights, equal protection often does.

This paper examines growing efforts to enable the revival of old regulatory regimes by extending the Court’s new “history and tradition” doctrine (which replaced traditional due process doctrine in Dobbs) to equal protection as well. “History and tradition” doctrine gauges a law’s constitutionality by asking whether the law would have been considered constitutional in 1791 or 1868. This approach sidelines concerns about equality, public health, and social wellbeing—and courts are adopting it not only in the context of reproductive rights, but in the context of guns as well. This new approach subverts 50 years of equality law, aggrandizes judicial power, and buries the value judgments that continue to influence major constitutional battles over guns and abortion.

Cary Franklin is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She is also the McDonald/Wright Chair of Law, Faculty Director of the Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy, and Faculty Director of the Williams Institute. Her research focuses on the historical development of conceptions of equality in American law and how this history influences the shape of contemporary legal protections in the contexts of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and race. She has published extensively in major law reviews. Her article “The Anti-Stereotyping Principle in Constitutional Sex Discrimination Law” (New York University Law Review, 2010), was awarded the Kathryn T. Preyer Prize by the American Society for Legal History. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was the W.H. Francis, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Texas. She received a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in English from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in English and History from Yale University.

Guest: Joshua Teitelbaum - David Belding Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Georgetown University. The workshop will start at 3:55 pm.

A conversation with Jaime Olaiz González, Professor of Constitutional Theory at Universidad Panamericana (Mexico), on the causes and consequences of the extraordinary ease of amendment in Mexico.

Guest: Talia Gilis - Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. The workshop with start 3:55pm.

Dr. Rupa Marya will deliver the tenth annual Frances Tarlton “Sissy” Farenthold Endowed Lecture in Peace, Social Justice and Human Rights. Dr. Marya is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. Dr. Marya founded the Deep Medicine Circle, a women of color-led organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, restoration and learning. She is also a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. Because of her work advancing health equity, Dr. Marya was appointed by Governor Newsom to the Healthy California for All Commission, to advance a model for universal healthcare in California. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.” Together with Raj Patel, she co-authored the bestselling book examining the health impacts of colonialism on bodies, societies and the planet called Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

The lecture will be moderated by Dr. Stephen Chao, assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, advisory board member of Physicians for a National Health Program, secretary of the National Council of Asian Pacific Islander Physicians, and vice president of Health Care for All Texas.

Named in honor of Sissy Farenthold (1926-2021), who dedicated her life to exposing and responding to injustices as a lawyer, legislator, and global leader in human rights, this lecture series inspires audiences to think and act creatively in response to the greatest human rights challenges of the 21st century. Read more on the lecture series here.