CFP: Women’s Choices, Women’s Voices: Legal Regimes and Women’s Health

Call for Speakers

AALS Section on Law, Medicine and Health Care
Co-Sponsored by Section on Women in Legal Education

Women’s Choices, Women’s Voices:  Legal Regimes and Women’s Health
Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, 4:00 –  5:45 p.m.

The AALS Section on Law, Medicine and Health Care will hold a program during the AALS 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA, co-sponsored by the Section on Women in Legal Education, on “Women’s Choices, Women’s Voices: Legal Regimes and Women’s Health.”   This panel will explore the ways in which the choices made in the legal system – at times without sufficient input from those most affected – influence women’s health.   Examples of this phenomenon can be found throughout health care.   In medical research, for example, the long-permissible exclusion of women from clinical studies, coupled with the historical focus on primarily male or gender-neutral medical conditions, has resulted in well-documented gaps in knowledge regarding appropriate treatment options for female patients (particularly women of color).   In the reproductive rights and technologies context, the services available to women may be affected by such legal doctrines as medical licensure, criminal law, and Constitutional and civil rights protections.   Even in the traditional bioethics areas of informed consent and end-of-life decisionmaking, the assumptions underlying the legal doctrine – reflected, for example, in the models we use to determine how a typical patient would want a dispute to be resolved – may not adequately reflect the options that women would like to have.   This panel will explore the ways in which the legal system’s approach to these issues affects women’s health, and how we might better integrate women’s voices – and their choices – into the discussion.

The AALS section is issuing an open Call for Speakers to fill the remaining slot on this panel.   To be considered, please submit a one or two paragraph summary of your topic to  jhkrause@email.unc.edu by August 15, 2010.   Submissions will be reviewed by members of the Executive Committee of the Section on Law, Medicine and Health Care, and authors will be notified in September 2010.

Participants will be responsible for paying their Annual Meeting registration fee and travel expenses.  Full-time faculty members of AALS member and fee-paid schools are eligible to submit papers.  Foreign, visiting and adjunct faculty members, graduate students, and fellows are not eligible to submit.

Inquiries should be submitted to Professor Joan Krause, UNC School of Law,  jhkrause@email.unc.edu.

-Bridget Crawford