Taboo Trades

Welcome to part 2 of my interview with Gabriel Rossman, Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack.  We continue our discussion of sex, drugs, and Islamic finance, among other taboo trades. 

It’s also our final episode of season 2. Please listen to the end of the episode for a special goodbye from America’s favorite law students. Thank you to Gabriel for helping us wrap up this season with a great episode. And thanks to all of you for listening. 

Want to buy sex, bribe a politician, or get your dumb kid into an Ivy League school? I discuss how to get away with taboo trades with Gabriel Rossman, an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA, and my co-host, UVA Law 3L Autumn Adams-Jack. 

Rossman studies cultural industries (such as radio and film) and economic sociology (including diffusion and disreputable exchange). He is interested in how people structure immoral exchanges like bribery to make them more subtle and therefore less obviously immoral. 

I’ve been an admirer of Rossman’s work for a number of years and was so happy to have this opportunity to talk to him about his research that I kept him longer than normal and have divided his podcast into two parts. In this part, we talk about sugar babies, college admissions, Bill Cosby, and Islamic finance. We also discuss a forthcoming book manuscript on the obfuscation of disreputable exchange that Gabriel generously shared, currently titled “How to Get Away With Paying Bribes, Buying Sex, and Selling Corpses.  

Suggested Readings

·      “It’s Only Wrong If It’s Transactional.” 2018. (with Oliver Schilke) American Sociological Review.

·      “Obfuscatory Relational Work and Disreputable Exchange.” 2014. Sociological Theory.

·      “The Diffusion of the Legitimate and the Diffusion of Legitimacy.” 2014. Sociological Science.

·      Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation. Princeton University Press. 2012. 

I discuss what it's like to need (and receive) a life-saving kidney transplant with AEI's Sally Satel (a two-time kidney transplant patient) and UVA 3L, Caitlyn Stollings, who co-hosts this episode.

Dr. Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the staff psychiatrist at a local methadone clinic in Washington D.C. She was also an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993 and remains a lecturer at Yale.

Importantly for our purposes, she is a two-time kidney transplant patient and has written widely about that experience. Dr. Satel is also the editor of When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors

Recommended Reading:
Desperately Seeking a Kidney - The New York Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com › magazine › 16kidney-t
Dec 16, 2007 —

The current kidney donation system is failing us.https://slate.com › technology › 2016/09 › the-current-...
Sep 13, 2016 —

Opinion | Generosity won't fix our shortage of organs for ...https://www.washingtonpost.com › news › 2015/12/28
Dec 28, 2015 —

Cook, Philip J., and Kimberly D. Krawiec. "If We Allow Football Players and Boxers to Be Paid for Entertaining the Public, Why Don't We Allow Kidney Donors to Be Paid for Saving Lives." Law & Contemp. Probs. 81 (2018): 9.

I discuss marijuana legalization and why Congress is so incompetent, with Ohio State's Douglas Berman and UVA Law 3L, Cortney Inman, my co-host for this episode.

Douglas Berman is the Newton D. Baker-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law, and the Executive Director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law. His principal teaching and research focus is criminal law and sentencing, and marijuana law and policy.

Professor Berman is the co-author of two casebooks. Sentencing Law and Policy and Marijuana Law and Policy. He has served as an editor of the Federal Sentencing Reporter for more than a decade and is the sole creator and author of the widely-read and widely-cited blog, Sentencing Law and Policy, which now receives nearly 100,000 page views per month and was the first blog ever cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Recommended Reading:

Drug Enforcement and Policy Center: Marijuana Reform Focus Area
https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/faculty-and-research/drug-enforcement-and-policy-center/marijuana-reform

Joanna Lampe, Congressional Research Service, Does the President Have the Power to Legalize Marijuana? (Nov. 4, 2021), at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10655  

Jennifer Le, Federal Cannabis Reform – Is 2022 the Year?, National Law Review (Feb 11, 2022), at
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/federal-cannabis-reform-2022-year 

Hailey Fuchs & Natalie Fertig, Big Weed is on the brink of scoring big political wins. So where are they?. Politico, Jan. 22, 2022, at https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/22/big-weed-brink-scoring-political-wins-527604 

Douglas Berman & Alex Kreit, Marijuana Law & Policy Casebook https://www.amazon.com/Marijuana-Law-Policy-Douglas-Berman/dp/1531010377

With the Final Four nearly upon us, I discuss college sports with Paul Haagen of Duke University and UVA Law 3L, Jackson Bailey.

Paul is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy at Duke University.

His principal academic interests are contracts, the social history of law, and law and sports.

Recommended Reading:

Sports in the Courts: The NCAA and the Future of Intercollegiate Revenue Sports, 103 Judicature 54-61 (2019)

Vida Panitch and I discuss (de)commodification, corruption, exploitation, and coercion with my co-host, UVA Law 3L, Nevah Jones. We're specifically interested in women's intimate and reproductive labor, including sex work, surrogacy, and egg donation. 

Vida Panitch is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Ethics and Public Affairs at Carleton University. Her primary research project addresses the moral boundaries of markets – specifically markets in public goods, including health care and education, and physical goods, including body parts and intimate services – and the extent to which theories of exploitation, commodification, and inequality can help us determine their permissible regulation. 

Recommended Reading:
1. Panitch, Vida. Decommodification as Exploitation (draft)
2. Panitch, Vida. Liberalism, commodification, and justice, in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (2020)
3. Panitch, Vida. Basic Income and Intimate Labor, The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income, Michael Cholbi and Michael Weber eds. (New York: Routledge): 157-174.

Co-hosts Samantha Spindler (UVA Law 2L), Madison White (UVA Law 3L), and I discuss pandemic responses with Govind Persad. Our focus is how to preserve personal choice in crisis response. 

Persad is an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm college of law. Persad’s research interests center on the legal and ethical dimensions of health insurance, health care financing, and markets in health care services, as well as professional ethics and the regulation of medical research.

Fred and I discuss what society owes to the bodies and memories of former slaves with our co-host, UVA Law 3L Tom DelRegno

Fred Smith Jr., a Professor of Law at Emory University. He is a scholar of the federal judiciary, constitutional law, and local government. In 2019, he was named the law school’s Outstanding Professor of the Year.

Additional Reading:
Smith Jr, Fred O. "On time,(in) equality, and death." Mich. L. Rev. 120 (2021): 195.
Smith, Fred O. "The Constitution After Death." Columbia Law Review 120.6 (2020): 1471-1548.

Kim and I, together with co-host (UVA 3L) Thalia Stanberry, discuss surrogacy, the right (or not) to procreate, and CRISPR

Kimberly Mutcherson is the Co-Dean and a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School in Camden. Her scholarship focuses on reproductive justice, bioethics, and family and health law.

Further reading:
(1) Kimberly Mutcherson, Reproductive Rights without Resources or Recourse (Hastings Center Report, fall 2018).
(2) Kimberly Mutcherson, Building Queer Families and the Ethics of Gestational Surrogacy (University of Richmond Law Rev, 2019).
(3) Sandy Sufian and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, The Dark Side of CRISPR, Scientific American, Feb. 16, 2021

Martha, John, and I discuss Martha's journey as a stranger donor with co-hosts Kaitlyn O'Malley and Caitlyn Stollings (UVA Law '22). Appearances are also made by Nevah Jones, Alex Leseney, Thalia Stanberry, Samantha Spindler, and Tom DelRegno.

Martha Gershun and John Lantos are  authors of Kidney To Share, a new book published by Cornell University Press.

Martha Gershun is the former Executive Director of Jackson County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). She is author of Care & Custody, and her work has appeared in The Kansas City Star, The New York Times Magazine, and The Radcliffe Quarterly. 

John D. Lantos, MD, is Director of the Bioethics Center at Children's Mercy Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine. His books include Do We Still Need Doctors, Neonatal Bioethics, and Controversial Bodies. He is Associate Editor of the American Journal of Bioethics, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and Current Problems in Pediatrics and Adolescent Health Care.