The Law of Placenta

Of the forms of reproductive labor in which legal scholars have been interested, placenta, the organ developed during pregnancy, has been overlooked. As placenta becomes an object of value for a growing number of individuals, researchers, clinicians, biobanks, and biotech companies, among others, its cultural meaning is changing. At the same time, these various constituencies may be at odds. Some postpartum parents and their families want to repossess their placenta for personal use, while third parties use placentas for a variety of research, medical, and commercial purposes

Should Human Milk Be Regulated?

Markets in human milk are booming. They take two main forms: informal markets—women giving or selling their milk peer-to-peer—, and formal markets—for-profit or non-profit organizations collecting, processing, and distributing donor milk to neonatal intensive care units and a few outpatients for a fee. The legal regime applicable to these human milk transactions is fragmented and unstable. The federal government does not define human milk as anything. The Food and Drug Administration has declined to regulate milk banks even though it oversees blood, cord, oocytes, semen, and stool banks. Only a handful of states have laws on the books pertaining to human milk. In light of the growing demand for human milk and public health professionals’ calls for government oversight due to fears of pathogen contamination, this Article asks whether human milk should be regulated more tightly and, if so, what types of legal reforms would be most desirable. It concludes that human milk should not be treated as a disembodied product under a food, drug, and tissue law paradigm, but rather as the product of a relationship between breastfeeders and breastfed babies. It is this relationship that is in urgent need of legal protections so that more parents can breastfeed their children and make extra milk available for others. Though the risks of contamination are real, they can be, and are, mitigated by milk banks, as well as by peer- to-peer donors and recipients. But many children who need donor milk do not obtain it either because it is unavailable or too expensive. Legal reforms should therefore focus on increasing the supply via robust breastfeeding and donor milk support, which in turn will make human milk accessible to all those who need it regardless of their socioeconomic status. This approach entails shifting from a single-minded focus on health and safety to considering the conditions of people who produce and donate milk and the health insurance market that often fails to cover it

When Judges Have Reasons Not to Give Reasons: A Comparative Law Approach

Influential theories of law have celebrated judicial reason-giving as furthering a host of democratic values, including judges’ accountability, citizens’ participation in djudication, and a more accurate and transparent decision-making process. This Article has two main purposes. First, it argues that although reason-giving is important, it is often in tension with other values of the judicial process, such as guidance, sincerity, and efficiency. Reason-giving must, therefore, be balanced against these competing values. In other words, judges sometimes have reasons not to give reasons. Second, contrary to common intuition, common law and civil law systems deal with this tension between reasons for and against reason-giving in increasingly similar ways. By combining theories of democratic legitimacy with empirical, doctrinal, and historical evidence of judges’ concrete reason-giving practices in the United States and Europe, the Article argues that rather than being in opposition, these two legal cultures are converging toward a common methodology. No longer can it be assumed that civil law judges and common law judges are on opposite ends of the spectrum

Histoire et théorie de la justification juridique : approche comparée

Mathilde Cohen, chargée de recherche au CNRS Ce séminaire a constitué une introduction à l’histoire et à la théorie de la justification juridique et, notamment, à la notion spécifiquement juridique de « motivation des décisions ». Nous poursuivrons cette problématique en 2010-2011 en nous concentrant plus particulièrement sur le cas des Cours constitutionnelles, dans le cadre d’un séminaire enseigné conjointement avec Pasquale Pasquino, intitulé : « Les Cours constitutionnelles et la raison p..

REASON-GIVING IN COURT PRACTICE: THE EXAMPLE OF FRENCH IMMIGRATION LITIGATION

Abstract: This Article examines the thesis according to which the practice of giving reasons for decisions is a central element of liberal democracies. In this view, public institutions’ practice—and sometimes duty—to give reasons is required so that each individual may view the state as reasonable and therefore, according to deliberative democratic theory, legitimate. Does the giving of reasons in actual court practice achieve these goals?  Drawing on empirical research carried out in a French administrative court, this Article argues that, in practice, reason-giving often falls either short of democracy or beyond democracy. Reasons fall short of democracy in the first case because they are transformed from a device designed to “protect” citizens from arbitrariness into a professional norm intended to “protect” the judges themselves and perhaps further their career goals. In the second case, reasons go beyond democracy because judges’ ambitions are much greater than to merely provide petitioners with a ground for understanding and criticizing the decision: they aim at positively—and paternalistically in some instances—guiding people’s conduct.  The discussion proceeds by drawing attention to social aspects that are often neglected in theoretical discussions on reason-giving. A skeptical conclusion is suggested: one can rarely guarantee that any predetermined value will be achieved by the giving of reasons. The degree to which individuals are empowered by the reasons given to them is dependent on the way in which decision-givers envision their reason-giving activity, and this representation is itself conditioned by the social setting of the court. Keywords: Arbitrariness. Reason-giving. Judges.

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on North American milk banks

This study aims to understand the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on human milk banking services in North America, with a focus on the United States. We triangulated questionnaire data with interviews and text-based website data. Of the 30 human milk bank services from which data were obtained, the majority faced substantial internal organization change in terms of staffing and protocols and experienced financial hardship in particular because of decreases in donor human milk orders. At the same time, most banks reported an increase in their numbers of donors and in the volume of milk collected. These results show that the pandemic significantly affected the way in which many North American milk banks operate, some lactating mothers donate their milk and, at least during the first few months of the crisis, certain hospitals' donor human milk ordering patterns changed. It suggests in particular that stay-at-home orders and the turn to remote work created the potential for a surge in human milk available for donation as a number of parents no longer needed their surplus for their own children. Legal and policy reform should focus on replicating the positive effects of the pandemic on breastfeeding by guaranteeing paid parental leave and flexible work conditions. Initiatives should also aim at counteracting its negative effects by mandating the insurance coverage of donor human milk, supporting milk banks financially and, more generally, integrating lactation and human milk banking services within the health system

Les Cours constitutionnelles et la raison publique. La motivation des décisions de justice

Mathilde Cohen, chargée de recherche au CNRSPasquale Pasquino, directeur de recherche au CNRS Ce séminaire a porté à la fois sur les débats contemporains concernant le libéralisme politique et sur les idées de constitutionnalisme et de démocratie constitutionnelle, à travers l’étude de la notion tant controversée de « raison publique ». Dans son Libéralisme politique, John Rawls déclare que la Cour suprême américaine constitue le parangon de la raison publique, entendue au sens de justificati..

Weakly-Supervised Surgical Phase Recognition

A key element of computer-assisted surgery systems is phase recognition of surgical videos. Existing phase recognition algorithms require frame-wise annotation of a large number of videos, which is time and money consuming. In this work we join concepts of graph segmentation with self-supervised learning to derive a random-walk solution for per-frame phase prediction. Furthermore, we utilize within our method two forms of weak supervision: sparse timestamps or few-shot learning. The proposed algorithm enjoys low complexity and can operate in lowdata regimes. We validate our method by running experiments with the public Cholec80 dataset of laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos, demonstrating promising performance in multiple setups