Taboo Trades

When is social pressure a justified response to wrongdoing, and when does it become an attempt to make someone betray their convictions? Scott Altman joins Kim Krawiec and student co-host Linnéa Selendy to discuss the ethics of boycotts, shunning, and shaming.

The conversation ranges from religious shunning and the Montgomery bus boycott to MeToo, political hiring and firing, and online pile-ons. We explore how threats to livelihood and social relationships can undermine integrity, why intent matters, and how mixed motives complicate moral judgment. Altman also considers whether hindsight makes his distinction between morally decent disagreement and oppression appear clearer than it is.

Social pressure can enforce important norms, but it also risks punishing innocent people or imposing disproportionate penalties. We discuss how to navigate those risks, whether restraint can protect the powerless, and when we should challenge excessive punishment by people on our own side.

Scott Altman — Scott Altman is the Virginia S. and Fred H. Bice Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His scholarship spans family law, jurisprudence, coercion, commodification, and the ethics of social and economic pressure.

Kim Krawiec — Kimberly D. Krawiec is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. She studies contested exchanges, including organ donation and reproductive markets, and hosts Taboo Trades.

Linnéa Selendy — Linnéa Selendy is a second-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law and this episode’s student co-host. She studied philosophy and environmental studies at Bates College and brings those interests to the discussion.

Scott Altman, Are Boycotts, Shunning, and Shaming Corrupt?, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 41(4), 987–1011 (2021). SSRN version.

Scott Altman, Hiring and Firing Based on Political Views, Southern California Law Review 99(1), 1–40 (2025). SSRN version.

Scott Altman, Discrimination, Noncomplicity, and Reasons That Mask Disdain, Ethics 136(1), 6–33 (2025).

‘Discrimination, Non-Complicity, and Reasons that Mask Disdain’. With Scott Altman and Alan Patten, PEA Soup, October 22, 2025.

Scott Altman, Reinterpreting the Right to an Open Future: From Autonomy to Authenticity, Law and Philosophy 37(4), 415–436 (2018). SSRN version.

Tyler Austin Harper, Why I Quit the Tenure Track, The Atlantic, August 10, 2026.

Jon Ronson, How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life, The New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2015.

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Why Harvard Was Wrong to Make Me Step Down, The New York Times, June 24, 2019.

Steven Davidoff Solomon, Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students, The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2023.

FollowTheMoney.org, National Institute on Money in Politics / OpenSecrets (website, n.d.).

OpenSecrets (website, n.d.).

Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. 617 (2018).

Harvard Students Felt Unsafe Under Weinstein Lawyer’s Watch. Now He’s Lost His Dean Post, On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti, WBUR, May 20, 2019.

Metropolitan Opera, Anna Netrebko withdraws from Met performances this spring, press release, March 3, 2022.

Maia Spoto, Disney Must Fight Musk-Backed ‘Mandalorian’ Actor Firing Suit, Bloomberg Law, July 25, 2024.

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, Harper’s Magazine, July 7, 2020.

College sports is experimenting with a new contractual device: transfer-triggered “buyouts” in athletes’ name, image, and likeness (NIL) agreements. Are these provisions legitimate estimates of a school’s difficult-to-measure losses, or are they penalties and functional noncompetes dressed in the language of contract damages?

Contracts scholar Dave Hoffman joins Kim Krawiec, student co-host Liz Jahoda-Wassung, and members of the UVA Law Taboo Trades seminar to examine that question through the litigation over quarterback Brendan Sorsby’s University of Cincinnati agreement and earlier cases involving college-coach buyouts. The conversation covers liquidated-damages doctrine, ex ante estimates of loss, intent to penalize breach, unconscionability, bargaining power and sophistication, athlete employment status, actual damages, specific performance, and the limits of contract law as a tool for stabilizing the rapidly changing college-sports market.

David A. Hoffman is the William A. Schnader Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. A widely cited contracts scholar, he uses empirical and interdisciplinary methods to study contracting theory and practice. He is a coauthor of Contract and Related Obligation: Theory, Doctrine, and Practice, writes the Contracts’ Empire Substack, and co-hosts the contracts podcast Promises, Promises with Tess Wilkinson-Ryan.

Liz Jahoda-Wassung is a second-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law. She studied audio engineering as an undergraduate and is interested in sports and entertainment law. Listeners can meet Liz and the other student co-hosts in the Season 7 introductory episode.

Kim Krawiec is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. More information is available on her personal website and at the Taboo Trades podcast.

• Dave Hoffman, “Schools Are Using NIL Buyouts Instead of Noncompetes to Deter Athletes’ Movement”
• Dave Hoffman, “The $1 Million NIL Buyout Is Weirder Than It Looks”
• David A. Hoffman and Erik Lampmann, “Hushing Contracts”
• Taboo Trades, “Nondisclosure Agreements with Mark Fenster and Dave Hoffman”
• Kimberly D. Krawiec and Nathan B. Oman, “The Case for Specific Performance of Personal Service Contracts”, 110 Iowa Law Review 751 (2025)
• Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, David Hoffman, and Emily Campbell, “Expecting Specific Performance”, 98 NYU Law Review 1633 (2023)
• Jacob Hale Russell, “Unconscionability’s Greatly Exaggerated Death”, 53 UC Davis Law Review 965 (2019)

• Vanderbilt University v. DiNardo, 174 F.3d 751 (6th Cir. 1999)
• Samson Sales, Inc. v. Honeywell, Inc., 12 Ohio St. 3d 27, 465 N.E.2d 392 (1984)

When does crime become work—and why does the legal system recognize some harmful activities as legitimate labor while criminalizing other activities undertaken to secure food, shelter, safety, or family survival?

Yvette Butler, Professor of Law at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, joins Kim Krawiec and UVA Law student cohosts Virginia Pillion and Sahanya Bhaktaram to discuss Butler’s article, Survival Labor.

The conversation explores the line between survival crime and survival labor; sex work, trafficking, and nonfinancial forms of necessity; what counts as a realistic alternative for someone acting under severe economic pressure; and whether the constitutional “right to earn a living” can protect marginalized workers without undermining labor regulation. Butler also discusses epistemic exclusion from lawmaking, remedies for people harmed by survival labor, the limits of universal basic income, and the unsettling contrast between criminalized workers and state-paid executioners.

• Yvette Butler, Survival Labor, 112 California Law Review 403 (2024).
• Yvette Butler, Silencing the Sex Worker, 71 UCLA Law Review 726 (2024).
• Yvette Butler, Traditionally Suspect: Common Occupations and the Right to Earn a Living.
• Kimberly D. Krawiec, Repugnant Work, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Work (2026).
• Yvette Butler, Epistemic Appropriation, Critical Defanging, and Lessons for a Responsive New Reconstruction, 105 Boston University Law Review 1239 (2025).
• Yvette Butler, Academic Freedom, Knowledge Erasure, and the Right to Earn a Living.
• William E. Forbath, The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age, 1985 Wisconsin Law Review 767.

Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski join Kim Krawiec, student co-hosts Joe Keys and Jake Ross, and members of UVA Law’s Taboo Trades seminar to discuss the second edition of Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests, a foundational work in the debate over the moral limits of markets.

Their central claim is provocative: if you may do something for free and whether to do it is within your discretion, there is some way you may do it for money. The argument leaves room for moral duties and extensive regulation while challenging critics to explain what payment itself makes wrong.

The conversation explores the burden of proof in arguments against markets, the famous Israeli daycare-fine study, and whether money corrupts our motives or changes what we learn about a situation. Examples ranging from dog breeding and education to organ markets and lifesaving rescues raise difficult questions about inequality, discretion, and the gap between moral permission and workable legal rules.

Jason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. A political philosopher, he writes about democracy, liberty, and the ethics of markets.

Peter Jaworski is an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where he teaches business ethics. His research examines the moral limits of markets, including compensation for blood plasma donors. He was Taboo Trades’ inaugural guest in season one, episode one.

Kimberly D. Krawiec is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. She studies contested exchanges, including organ donation, reproductive markets, and sex work, as well as financial regulation and business organizations. She hosts Taboo Trades.

Joe Keys is a third-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law and a student co-host of this episode.

Jake Ross is a second-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law and a student co-host of this episode.

• Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski, Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests, 2nd ed. (Routledge 2022).
• Jason Brennan and Peter Martin Jaworski, “Markets without Symbolic Limits,” 125 Ethics 1053–1077 (2015).
• Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” 29 Journal of Legal Studies 1–17 (2000).
• Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “Pay Enough or Don’t Pay at All,” 115 Quarterly Journal of Economics 791–810 (2000).
• Michael J. Sandel, “How Markets Crowd Out Morals,” with Herbert Gintis’s response, “Giving Economists Their Due,” and Sandel’s reply, “Keeping Markets in Their Place” (Boston Review 2012).
• Mark Wells, “Markets with Some Limits,” 51 Journal of Value Inquiry 611–618 (2017).
• Peter M. Jaworski, Bloody Well Pay Them: The Case for Voluntary Remunerated Plasma Collections (2020).
• Kimberly D. Krawiec, “Markets, Repugnance, and Externalities,” 19 Journal of Institutional Economics 944–955 (2023).
• Kieran Healy and Kimberly D. Krawiec, “Repugnance Management and Transactions in the Body,” 107 American Economic Review 86–90 (2017).

• Plasma with Peter Jaworski — Taboo Trades, season one, episode one (August 25, 2020).

June Carbone joins Kim Krawiec, student co-host Damon Stefankiewicz, and members of UVA Law’s Taboo Trades seminar to discuss “Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men,” coauthored with Clare Huntington. Carbone argues that the difficulties facing boys and men—particularly those without college degrees—are rooted in economic precarity and policy choices, and that family law can compound these problems by excluding unmarried fathers from the support available to divorcing parents while subjecting lower-income families to punitive child-support and family-regulation systems. The conversation explores the authors’ proposal for voluntary, community-based family centers, along with difficult questions about safety, consent, funding, intimate partner violence, mandatory reporting, and how to promote engaged fatherhood without restoring patriarchal authority.

About the Guest

June Carbone is the Robina Chair in Law, Science and Technology at the University of Minnesota Law School. An expert in family law, assisted reproduction, property, law and medicine, and bioethics, she writes extensively about marriage, inequality, family structure, and the legal regulation of families.

About the Host

Kimberly D. Krawiec is the Charles O. Gregory Professor of Law and Glynn Family Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Her research examines taboo or contested exchanges, including organ donation, reproductive markets, and sex work, as well as the regulation of financial markets and business organizations. She is the host of Taboo Trades.

About the Student Co-Host

Damon Stefankiewicz is a second-year student at the University of Virginia School of Law and the student co-host of this episode.

Paper Discussed

• June Carbone and Clare Huntington, “Fatherhood, Family Law, and the Crisis of Boys and Men,” 124 Columbia Law Review 2153 (2024).
• Clare Huntington, the paper’s coauthor, is the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. 

Books and Articles Discussed or Referenced

• Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit, Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy(Simon & Schuster 2024).
• Clare Huntington, “Postmarital Family Law: A Legal Structure for Nonmarital Families,” 67 Stanford Law Review 167 (2015).
• Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (Brookings Institution Press 2022).
• Melissa S. Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind (University of Chicago Press 2023).
• Tonya L. Brito, “The Child Support Debt Bubble,” 9 UC Irvine Law Review 953 (2019).
• Solangel Maldonado, “Deadbeat or Deadbroke: Redefining Child Support for Poor Fathers,” 39 UC Davis Law Review 991 (2006).
• Daniel L. Hatcher, Injustice, Inc.: How America’s Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (University of California Press 2023).

In this episode, we welcome listeners to Season 7 of the Taboo Trades Podcast and introduce this year’s UVA Law student hosts: Mia Armstrong, Sahanya Bhaktaram, Tyler Donovan, Kate Garmer, Liz Jahoda-Wassung, Joseph Keys, Angelica Kim, Virginia Pillion, Jake Ross, Linnea Selendy, and Damon Stefankiewicz. Meet the students who will guide us through a new season of conversations about the markets and exchanges society considers uncomfortable, controversial, or taboo.

My guests today are Andrew Gilden, Southwestern Law School, and Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec, William & Mary Law School. They join me today to discuss their recent paper, Patenting the Taboo: Sex, Drugs, and Abortion, recently published in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology. It’s a really fun article that looks at patent applications in three taboo spaces: sexual pleasure, illicit drugs, and abortion technologies. Some of the themes are very similar to ones Andrew Jennings and I highlight in our recent paper, Vice Capital, in which we interview founders and investors in these same spaces. I highly recommend their paper, even if you don’t have a particular interest or expertise in patent law.

Show Notes

About Andrew Gilden

About Sarah Rajec

About Kim Krawiec

Gilden, Andrew, and Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec. "Patenting the Taboo: Sex, Drugs, and Abortion." Yale Journal of Law and Technology, forthcoming (2025).

Gilden, Andrew, and Sarah R. Wasserman Rajec. "Pleasure Patents." BCL Rev. 63 (2022): 571.

Jennings, Andrew K., and Kimberly D. Krawiec. "Vice Capital." UC Irvine Law Review 15 (2025): 427.

My student co-hosts sign off, bringing Season 6 to an official close. Never fear, I'll be back throughout 2026 with exciting bonus episodes.

My guest today is Diane Tober, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. She is a medical anthropologist with a focus on biocultural aspects of health, gender and sexuality, the commodification of the body, science and technology studies, bioethics, and social and reproductive justice. She has been conducting research exploring egg donors’ decisions and experiences within the global market for human eggs since 2013. She joins us today to discuss her recent book, Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them (Routledge 2024). This episode is co-hosted by UVA Law 2Ls, Rachel Duffy and Rachel Greenbaum.

Show Notes

About Diane Tober

About Kim Krawiec

About Rachel Duffy

About Rachel Greenbaum

Diane Tober, Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them (Routledge 2024)

Kimberly D. Krawiec, Gametes: Commodification and The Fertility Industry, in Routledge Handbook of Commodification, Routledge, 278–289 (1 ed. 2023).

Krawiec, Kimberly D. "Markets, repugnance, and externalities." Journal of Institutional Economics 19.6 (2023): 944-955.

My guest today is Prabha Kotiswaran, a Professor of Law & Social Justice at King’s College London. Professor Kotiswaran’s main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, feminist legal studies and sociology of law.

She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, published by Princeton University Press (2011), which won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics. She joins us today to discuss two recent articles, linked in the show notes below, on egg donation and surrogacy in India.

This episode is co-hosted by UVA Law 3Ls Gabriel Andrade and Buddy Palmer. 

Show Notes

About Prabha Kotiswaran

About Kim Krawiec

About Gabriel Andrade

About Buddy Palmer

Madhusree Jana and Prabha Kotiswaran, Legal (Dis)Orders A Feminist Assessment of India’s Assisted Reproductive Technology and Surrogacy LawsLinks to an external site., Amicus Curiae, Series 2, Vol 6, No 2, 300-323 (2025)

Jana, M., & Kotiswaran, P., Reproductive resistance, law, and informality: a critique of the Indian Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021Links to an external site.. Journal of Gender Studies, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2025.2490844Links to an external site. (2025)

Prabha Kotiswaran, Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, Princeton University Press (2011).

Kimberly D. Krawiec, “