Public Lectures from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

Between November 2021 and February 2022 Sir Greenwood was interviewed three times. The interviewer is Lesley Dingle.

The interviews were recorded, and the audio version is available on this website with transcripts of those recordings:

- First Interview (16 November 2021): Early Life and Career

- Second Interview (23 November 2021): LSE, ICJ and Master of Magdalene

- Third Interview (1 February 2022): Scholarly works

For more information, see the Squire website at https://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/cambridge-law-eminent-scholars-archive

On Thurday 17th March leading UK ferry operator P&O Ferries sacked 800 British crew across its entire fleet and stopped all sailings. The move sparked fury amongst employees and unions, and consternation in parliament. Many asked was the move - and the proposal to use cheap agency staff instead - legal, and also was it a result of Brexit?

In this recording, Professor Catherine Barnard considers the legal implications, and the Brexit question.

Catherine Barnard is Professor of European Union Law and Employment Law at the University of Cambridge, and Deputy Director at UK in a Changing Europe.

This item was originally published as a blog via UK in a Changing Europe at: https://ukandeu.ac.uk/po-ferries-and-employment-law/

For more information about Professor Barnard, please refer to her profile at https://www.law.cam.ac.uk/people/academic/cs-barnard/9

Law in Focus is a collection of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty.

This entry provides an audio source for iTunes.

Simanti Dasgupta is an associate professor of anthropology and the director of the International Studies Program at the University of Dayton. Her overarching interest in the politics of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial and neoliberal nation-states link her works. She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Prophylactic Rights: Sex Work, HIV/AIDS and Anti-Trafficking in Sonagachi, India, based on her ethnographic research with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers’ collective, since 2011. She published this work in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Anti-Trafficking Review, Opendemocracy:Beyond trafficking and slavery and The Conversation. She previously authored BITS of Belonging: Information Technology, Water and Neoliberal Governance in India (Temple University Press, 2015), which examined the emerging neoliberal politics in urban India at the intersection of Information Technology and water privatization. She can be reached at [email protected].

Prophylactic Rights examines the emergence of the sex work labour subjectivity at the intersection of two state surveillance regimes: HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking. It draws on ethnographic work since 2011 with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex workers' collective in Sonagachi. In 1992 the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health identified sex workers as a High-Risk Group and launched the Sexually Transmitted Diseases/HIV Intervention Project (SHIP) in Sonagachi. SHIP recruited sex workers as peer-educators to introduce others to the etiology of HIV/AIDS and promote the condom as the prophylactic device. In addressing structural barriers –poverty and stigma –SHIP achieved remarkable success in reducing new HIV infections through the sustained use of condoms. More importantly, SHIP extended the prophylactic narrative beyond public health to emphasize the threat the virus posed to the labour and livelihood of the women. The rearticulation of HIV/AIDS as a question of the labouring body that is worthy of rights, was unprecedented in Sonagachi. It motivated the peer educators to establish Durbar in 1995 as a collective to demand sex work rights and juridically delink it from trafficking. The existing literature posits both sex work and sex workers as a priori categories, when the categories themselves are relatively new in Sonagachi. This project examines how the labor narrative emerges in dissociation from ‘prostitution’ and how ‘prostitutes’ come to inhabit the worker position. I argue that for labor to emerge as a political category, the women submitted to HIV/AIDS and anti-trafficking surveillances, while also subverting them with resistive connotations. In formulating what I term, the ‘medicolegal unstable’, I further show that the struggle for labor rights in such instances of historical marginalization, is characteristically uneven, that is, advances in HIV/AIDS prevention and related health rights of sex workers are often undermined by regressive anti-trafficking laws.

Regenerative medicine seeks to regrow, repair, or replace damaged tissues. Current regenerative technologies include the bio-engineering of organs and tissues, cell reprogramming, and gene editing. Such interventions are significant not only for present-day patients, but also for future generations. They challenge the concept of the self as ‘biologically finite’ or ‘genetically determined’ and blur traditional distinctions between therapy and enhancement and between humans, animals, and things.

Given the ways in which regenerative medicine blurs socially-significant boundaries, the ethical and legal obligations of clinicians, researchers, funders, and governments are fluid and uncertain. For example, it is unclear whether present policies governing the use of regenerative technologies offer sufficient safeguards, even if access is limited to patients with conditions deemed sufficiently serious to justify the risks.

This talk explores whether international human rights law might require governments to identify, monitor, and support translational pathways that would provide broad, equitable access to the benefits of regenerative medicine, or whether international human rights law requires a more controlled approach because of the potential social implications. With regenerative medicine's great potential, the welfare of current and future generations is at stake. We must collectively ask ourselves how best to secure a desirable clinical future for present day and future generations.

About the Speaker:

Bartha Maria Knoppers is Full Professor, Canada Research Chair in Law and Medicine, and Director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University.

Baron Cornelius Ver Heyden de Lancey (1889-1984) was a wealthy and public-spirited Dutchman who at different times in his life was a dentist, doctor, surgeon, barrister and art historian. In 1970 he created the De Lancey and De La Hanty Foundation, to promote studies in medico-legal topics. The Foundation generously gave Cambridge the Ver Heyden de Lancey Fund, which since 1996 has funded occasional public lectures on medico-legal issues of current interest.

For more information about the Baron Ver Heyden de Lancey Lecture series, please see http://www.lml.law.cam.ac.uk/events/vhdl-events