College of Law

: New Maternity; Constitutional law has long assumed that mothers and fathers are fundamentally different. Maternity, that law posits, is certain, obvious, and monolithic - consolidated in an easily identifiable person who is at once a biological, social, and legal parent. Paternity, in contrast, is construed as uncertain, nonobvious, relative, and often unclear. Over time, constitutional law has grown more insistent about the obviousness of motherhood. It also has cemented its idea of maternity into a fundamental principle of sex equality law that applies in settings - like transgender rights - that have nothing to do with certain mothers and uncertain fathers. Constitutional law's logic of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty invites criticism for many reasons. It channels the notion that pregnant women are presumptive mothers. It perpetuates questionable stereotypes about mothers and fathers. It determines who can be a parent and how he, she, or they ought to parent. It is in serious tension with constitutional law's disestablishment idea. For all of these reasons, constitutional maternity warrants reform, and one promising pathway of reform is family law's less regressive and more multidimensional vision of motherhood. Never as uncomplicated as the Supreme Court has assumed, maternity has become considerably more complex in light of the new forms of kinship enabled by alternative reproduction and its legal accommodation. During the exact time that the Supreme Court has insisted that women and men are inherently different because of maternal certainty and paternal uncertainty, state family law has painted a more complicated picture. Maternity, that picture suggests, often is uncertain and nonobvious. It often is relative. Like paternity, it often is a matter of opinion - judicial opinion. Most remarkably, state family law has shown that maternity is all of these things by relying on the same body of federal constitutional doctrine that insists that mothers and fathers are fundamentally different - and fundamentally different because mothers, unlike fathers, are basic, singular, and monolithic. This Article argues that progressive advances surrounding the new maternity ought to unsettle regressive tendencies surrounding constitutional maternity. These regressive tendencies touch and burden many: from unmarried fathers and transgender individuals to nonbiological and biological mothers. This Article imagines what the new maternity emerging from family law would mean for constitutional law. The idea that the new maternity could unsettle constitutional maternity is not necessarily radical - that project has been unfolding in state courts for years. The consolidation of the new maternity in constitutional law, however, could have meaningful consequences both within and beyond the law of parenthood, destabilizing everything from parentage regimes that rest on the notion of essential biological difference to the argument that transgender discrimination is not illegal because "sex" is not "a stereotype.", pregnancy, law, sex, discrimination, body, constitution, equal-protection, illegitimate, levy v louisiana, rights

: Opportunities, Constraints and Critical Supports for Achieving Sustainable Local Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in Africa; At the request of the Open Society Foundations Public Health Program (OSF-PHP), a Team of researchers assembled by Nova Worldwide Consulting undertook to study whether and to what extent gaps in the availability of financing are constraining the development of pharmaceutical manufacturing in Africa, especially to address COVID-19. In this context, pharmaceuticals are understood to include diagnostics, vaccines and treatments (DVT), as well as personal protective equipment (PPE). Assuming that gaps in the availability of or access to financing are acting as a constraint on local production, what steps or measures might be advocated to address those gaps?, Fincance, Pharmaceutical manufacturing, Africa, Commissioned by Open Society Foundations - Public Health Program. Available at https://nova-worldwide.com/OSF-PHP_report, F. Abbott, R. Abbott, J. Fortunak, P. Gehl Sampath & D. Walwyn, Opportunities, Constraints and Critical Supports for Achieving Sustainable Local Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in Africa: With a Focus on the Role of Finance, Final Report, March 18, 2021 (Nova Worldwide), available at https://nova-worldwide.com/OSF-PHP_report; DOI: 10.33009/osf-php_report

: Populist Constitutions; This Essay draws on recent academic definitions of populism and recent examples of its use in order to show that there is an affinity between populism and widespread constitutional change. It argues that populists use constitutional change to carry out three functions: deconstructing the old institutional order, developing a substantive project rooted in a critique of that order, and consolidating power in the hands of populists. Thus, access to the tools of constitutional change may accentuate both the promise of populism as a corrective to stagnating liberal democracies and the threat that it poses to those constitutional orders. I also argue that there is a trajectory to populist constitutionalism: populist constitutions begin by emphasizing their promise to improve on existing liberal-democratic constitutional orders and obscuring their underlying consolidation of power, but if populists are able to maintain power for long periods of time, they will likely become overtly illiberal, arguing that their substantive goals cannot be met within the confines of liberal democracy. This suggests at least two separate agendas: one that prevents the forms of constitutional change that allow populists to mold the constitutional order so that they become difficult to dislodge and a second that makes a stronger affirmative case for the virtues of liberal democracy., Keywords: chavez

: The Rhetoric Of Science And Why It Matters

: Universalizing anonymity anxiety.; Publication Note: This NIH-funded author manuscript originally appeared in PubMed Central at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5570718.

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