My guest today is Sadie Blanchard, a Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. She teaches and writes about contracts, corporations, and international business law. Her research examines how legal institutions interact with social forces to shape behavior, especially in markets. She’s here today to discuss her recent article, Contract or Prison, in the University of Chicago Law Review. The paper discusses the expansion and privatization of “Incarceration Alternative” arrangements, such as electronic monitoring, criminal diversion, and parole and probation. Blanchard argues that, while the norm of expanded choice that justifies enforcement of contracts has prima facie plausibility in this context, the agreements ultimately fail under classical contract theory because they are made against the background of entitlements created to extract value from people using the coercive power of the criminal legal system. This episode is co-hosted by UVA Law 3L, Kyndall Walker.

Show Notes

About Sadie Blanchard

About Kim Krawiec

About Kyndall Walker

Sandie Blanchard, Contract or Prison (forthcoming, University of Chicago Law Review 2025)

Additional Reading Discussed (or relevant to the discussion):

John H. Langbein, Understanding the Short History of Plea Bargaining, 13 Law & Society Review 261 (1979)

John H. Langbein, Torture and Plea Bargaining, 46 Univ. Chicago Law Review 4 (1978); republished in Spanish as “Tortura Y Plea Bargaining,” in El Procedimiento Abreviado (J.B. Maier & A. Bovino eds.) (Buenos Aires 2001); substantially republished in The Public Interest (Winter 1980) at 43; latter version republished in The Public Interest on Crime and Punishment (N. Glazer ed. 1984)

Robert E. Scott & William J. Stuntz, Plea-Bargaining as a Social Contract, 101 Yale L. J. 1909 (1992). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/317

Emma Kaufman, "The Prisoner Trade," 133 Harv. L. Rev. 1815 (2020)

My guest today is Elaine Perlman, an altruistic kidney donor, President of the Coalition to Modify NOTA, and Executive Director of Waitlist Zero. She is leading campaigns to pass the End Kidney Deaths Act (which is the subject of our discussion today) and the Honor Our Living Donors Act.

As a bit of background, the End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687/ EKDA) is a ten year pilot program that would provide a refundable tax credit of $10,000 each year for five years ($50,000 total) to living kidney donors who donate a kidney to a stranger, which would go to those who have been waiting longest on the kidney waitlist. You can read the full text of the End Kidney Deaths Act from the link in the show notes, along with other relevant sources that we discuss during today’s podcast.

Show Notes

About Elaine Perlman

About Kim Krawiec

About Denise Azadeh

End Kidney Deaths Act legislation

JAMA opposition article

Our JAMA response

Their JAMA reply

Good Morning America segment, Elaine’s son meeting his recipient (9 minutes)

Video about ethics and the End Kidney Deaths Act (3 minutes)

Video "Why Donate our Kidney to a Stranger (20 minutes)

Hello listeners and welcome to a new season of the Taboo Trades podcast! I’m back again with a great group of UVA Law students who will guide us through the latest research and current events in a variety of taboo settings. We’ll discuss compensating living kidney donors, commercial surrogacy in India, plea bargaining, animal welfare, fish and wildlife conservation, and much, much more. Some of our guests argue that currently taboo trades shouldn’t be. And some will argue that currently accepted trades should be taboo. We have a great line-up of guests and topics that I know you’ll enjoy. Now, I’ll turn it over to the real stars of the show – the Taboo Trades student hosts for Season 6. They are: Gabriel (Gabe) Andrade, Denise Azadeh, Rachel Duffy, RachelGreenbaum, CatherineHu, Mason Marche, Sarita (Sari) Mithal, BradleyNoble, Buddy Palmer, ReidePetty, CindyTran, Kyndall Walker

I’m joined today by two special guests to discuss an unusual and ethically complex type of organ donation – imminent death donation, or IDD. As you’ll hear Thao Galvan explain in the episode, organ donation currently has three standard types: living donation, donation after brain death (a type of deceased donation in which the patient is declared brain dead, and thus legally dead), and donation after circulatory death, or DCD. In DCD, a patient who is not brain dead is removed from life support, but the heart keeps beating. If it takes the patient more than roughly 90 minutes to die, the organs may not be usable. IDD, or imminent death donation, attempts to prevent that, by retrieving non-vital organs (usually a kidney) for donation prior to the removal of life support.

Thao Galvan is a transplant surgeon and professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine. Kathy Osterrieder is a retired financial analyst, who came to this issue after attempting, unsuccessfully, to donate the organs of her late husband, Robert Osterrieder, after making the difficult decision to remove him from life support. It is another first for the Taboo Trades podcast – the first time in over five years of recording that I’ve been unable to hold back the tears, as Kathy talks about what the experience was like for her family.

Links

Host: Kimberly D. Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests:

Nhu Thao Nguyen Galvan, M.D., M.P.H., FACS, Associate Professor of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine

Kathleen Osterrieder, Donor Family Member in Spirit, Retired Financial Analyst

Reading:

The Difficult Ethics of Organ Donations From Living Donors, Wall St. J. (2016)

Let’s change the rules for organ donations — and save lives, Wash. Post (2019)

OPTN, Ethical considerations of imminent death donation white paper (2016)

Survey of public attitudes towards imminent death donation in the United States, Am. J. Transplant. (2020)

Sign up to be an organ donor!

Welcome to a very special bonus episode of the Taboo Trades podcast! Today I have a record number of guests – five in total—continuing a discussion that we began at Yale’s Newman Colloquium earlier this summer. We discuss exploitation and trafficking in international human rights law, especially in the context of reproductive and sexual labor. You’ll hear more about that colloquium and that conversation during the podcast. Each guest introduces themselves at the start of the podcast, but you can also read their full bios and a reading list in the show notes.

Host: Kim Krawiec, Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law, University of Virginia

Guests:

Janie Chuang, Professor of Law, American University, Washington College of Law

Dina Francesca Haynes, Executive Director, Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights; Lecturer in Law (spring term), and Research Scholar in Law, Yale University

Joanne Meyerowitz, Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and Professor of American Studies, Yale University

Alice M. Miller, Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Law and Co-Director, Global Health Justice Partnership, Yale University

Mindy Jane Roseman, Director of International Law Programs and Director of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights, Yale University

Reading List:

Janie A. Chuang

• "Preventing trafficking through new global governance over labor migration." Ga. St. UL Rev. 36 (2019): 1027.
• “Exploitation Creep And The Unmaking Of Human Trafficking Law.” The American Journal of International Law, vol. 108, no. 4, 2014, pp. 609–49. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5305/amerjintelaw.108.4.0609 . Accessed 13 June 2025.

Dina Haynes

• "Used, abused, arrested and deported: Extending immigration benefits to protect the victims of trafficking and to secure the prosecution of traffickers." Human Rights Quarterly 26.2 (2004): 221-272. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/168121
• "Client-centered human rights advocacy." Clinical L. Rev. 13 (2006): 379.
• "Sacrificing women and immigrants on the altar of regressive politics." Human Rights Quarterly41.4 (2019): 777-822. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/735796

Kimberly D. Krawiec

• Repugnant Work (April 21, 2025). Forthcoming, Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Work (Julian Jonker and Grant Rozeboom, eds.), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5225038
• “Markets, Repugnance, and Externalities.” Journal of Institutional Economics 19, no. 6 (2023): 944–55. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137422000157 .

Joanne Meyerowitz<

In this sign off episode, I say good bye to this year's student cohosts from UVA Law: Anthony Freyre, Kimberly Garcia, Laura Habib, Olivia King, Alyssa Lawrence, Alyssa Marshall, Alexa Rothborth, Nia Saunders, Tanner Stewart, Cyrus Tafti, John Henry Vansant, Lauren White

But never fear, loyal listeners. I'll be back in 2025 with bonus episodes featuring interesting authors discussing their scholarship.

My guest today is Aziza Ahmed, a Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at the Boston University School of Law. She is also a Co-Director of BU Law’s Program on Reproductive Justice. She joins me and UVA Law 3L, Nia Saunders, to discuss her new book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2025.

Prior to teaching, Professor Ahmed was a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health and Human Rights. She came to that position after a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship where she worked with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS. Professor Ahmed was a member of the Technical Advisory Group on HIV and the Law convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has been an expert for many institutions, including the American Bar Association and UNDP.

Reading List

• • Ahmed Bio
  • Linda C. McClain & Aziza Ahmed, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Covid-19 (2024)
  • SCHOLARLY COMMONS
• Nicole Huberfeld, Linda C. McClain & Aziza Ahmed,Rethinking Foundations and Analyzing New Conflicts: Teaching Law after Dobbs 17 Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy (2024). SCHOLARLY COMMONS
• Aziza Ahmed, Dabney P. Evans, Jason Jackson, Benjamin Mason Meier & Cecília Tomori, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health: Undermining Public Health, Facilitating Reproductive Coercion 51 Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (2023)
• SCHOLARLY COMMONS
• Aziza Ahmed, Feminist Legal Theory and Praxis after Dobbs: Science, Politics, and Expertise 34 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2023)
• SCHOLARLY COMMONS
• Krawiec Bio

My guest today is the always interesting and funny Steve Clowney, a professor of law at the University of Arkansas. He has also worked as a legal consultant in Hawaii, a college admissions officer, and a gravedigger. His main areas of research include zoning regulations, monuments, the history of cities, handwritten wills, and the presence of violence in informal property systems. He joins us today to discuss a paper that I’ve long admired, Does Commodification Corrupt: Lessons From Paintings And Prostitutes, published in the Seton Hall Law Review.

Reading list:

Clowney Bio https://law.uark.edu/directory/directory-faculty/uid/sclowney/name/Steve+Clowney/

Clowney, Nationalize Zoning, 72 Kan. L. Rev. (forthcoming) (symposium essay).

Clowney, Do Rural Places Matter?, 57 Conn. L. Rev. 1 (forthcoming).

Clowney, Anonymous Statues: An Empirical Study of Monuments in One American Neighborhood, 71 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol'y 35 (2023) (symposium essay).

Clowney, The White Houses? An Empirical Study of Segregation in the Greek System, 41 Yale L. & Pol'y Rev. 151 (2023).

Clowney, Sororities as Confederate Monuments, 105 Ky. L.J. 617 (2020) (symposium essay).

Clowney, Does Commodification Corrupt: Lessons From Paintings and Prostitutes, 50 Seton Hal L. Rev. 1005 (2020).

Clowney, Should We Buy Selling Sovereignty, 66 Duke L.J. Online 19 (2017).

Krawiec Bio https://www.law.virginia.edu/faculty/profile/kdk4q/1181653

Krawiec, Markets, repugnance, and externalities, Journal of Institutional Economics 1–12 (2023).

Krawiec, No Money Allowed, 2022 University of Chicago Legal Forum 221–240 (2022).