Faculty Publications

Health justice offers a theoretical framework for addressing health disparities through law and policy by responding to the structural causes of health disparities. This is a key feature of the health justice framework. Placing critical analyses of colorism in conversation with health justice, and even health law more broadly, offers space for contending with the complicated ways in which
skin-color-based discrimination harms
health.
Human Rights, ABA Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Feminist scholars critique food and drug law as a site of gender bias and regulatory neglect. The historical exclusion of women from clinical trials by the FDA prioritized male bodies as the object of clinical research and therapies. Likewise, the FDA’s prior restriction on access to contraceptive birth control illustrates how patriarchal and paternalistic attitudes within the Agency can harm women’s reproductive health. However, there is little analysis of how race and gender intersect in this domain.

Long haulers are just one more group excluded from fully participating in academe.

This Essay critically examines how medicine actively engages in the reproductive subordination of Black women. In obstetrics, particularly, Black women must contend with both gender and race subordination. Early American gynecology treated Black women as expendable clinical material for its institutional needs. This medical violence was animated by biological racism and the legal and economic exigencies of the antebellum era. Medical racism continues to animate Black women’s navigation of and their dehumanization within obstetrics.