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Reproductive Rights in the Legal Academy: A New Role for Transnational Law
Abstract
Most law school courses approach reproductive rights law from a purely domestic perspective, as an extensive survey of casebooks and course material reveals. The authors argue that a transnational perspective can enhance the teaching of sexual and reproductive health in all of the law school courses and doctrinal settings in which this topic in treated. While the topic of “Global Sexual and Reproductive Rights” can be presented in a free-standing course, transnational perspectives should also be integrated across the curriculum where sexual and reproductive rights are discussed. Expanding reproductive rights pedagogy to address transnational perspectives will aid in exposing a wide range of students to transnational material, will expand students’ preparedness to analyze such materials, and will better reflect the debates on sexual and reproductive health currently taking place outside of law school classrooms. Drawing on a range of foreign and international material, the authors provide specific suggestions for integrating such material into courses on Constitutional Law, Family Law and Bioethics.
... , Abortion and the law, Round Hall Sweet and Maxwell, USA.27 Davis, Martha F. and Bethany Withers (2009), "Reproductive Rights in the Legal Academy: A New Role for on how this is already being carried out in different universities, see, e.g. the LLM course on 'Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Africa' (including the modules of 'International Human Rights law relevant to sexual and reproductive rights in Africa', and 'Using human rights principles to realise sexual and reproductive health rights claims'), in the 2017 curriculum of the University of Pretoria, South Africa, at http://www. chr.up.ac.za/index.php/curriculum.html; ...
En este artículo se realizará una proyección y un análisis de las principales tendencias que el derecho internacional público, el derecho comparado y las perspectivas transnacionales han seguido al abordar el tema del aborto. Examinará la forma en que se construye la argumentación e interpretación jurídica, las aproximaciones y criterios que los juristas, legisladores y tribunales han adoptado al seleccionar los puntos de comparación, así como los variados temas, derechos y valores sociales que entran en escrutinio cuando se hace frente a este asunto. Lo hará primordialmente bajo el marco referencial del derecho internacional de los derechos humanos, como un enfoque a través del cual las posturas académicas, las instancias legislativas y las visiones prácticas sobre el aborto pueden estudiarse, teniendo en cuenta los valores y objetivos universales que sirven de fundamento a tales derechos.
The Bologna Process aims at enhancing international mobility among students and professors by improving the similarities among legal curriculums and, with it, making the recognition of credits obtained in other universities easier. This standpoint opens the door to many ways to internationalize the legal teaching, aiming this paper at highlighting some of them; beyond the possibility of spending one semester or one course in a foreign university -already planned in most legal curriculums-, this paper outlines the fact that the current openness to other legal systems, imposed by the internationalization of societies and economies, must be taken into account in the design of the legal curriculum as well, and in particular by adapting the teaching methodology, with a special attention to the comparative law method besides other pedagogical tools.
Many American legal scholars have chronicled the growing importance of international and comparative legal principles in understanding and resolving contemporary legal issues. Others have asserted that the practice of law itself is becoming global, although few have attempted to demonstrate the globalization of legal practice in any systematic way. Claims about the globalization of law have led in turn to proposals for the globalization of the law school curriculum. Innovative legal educators have advanced a variety of creative proposals for incorporating more attention to global legal issues in the course work of law students. But this scholarship includes relatively little discussion about the globalization of Legal Research and Writing (LRW), the course in which most students acquire the basic tools they use to learn law on their own. While some LRW professors have pioneered the inclusion of foreign and international perspectives in their courses, few have done so in a consistent and thoroughgoing way. This article endeavors to address this omission by arguing in favor of including a comparative and international perspective in the standard LRW curriculum. We argue that the empirical and normative premises which lie behind proposals for globalizing the law curriculum also support exposure to research and advocacy involving foreign and international law as part of the basic “toolkit” of skills that all students learn through LRW instruction. Without introducing a global perspective in LRW, the other changes in the law school curriculum will have limited impact. With an introduction to the sources and methods of using international and comparative law in LRW, however, students will be equipped to integrate global and domestic components into their analysis of a wide range of legal subjects, making the global perspective mainstream. To address the lack of empirical evidence concerning globalization in practice, the article presents a survey of the approximately 10,000 members of the Philadelphia Bar Association regarding the extent to which they encounter foreign and international law issues in practice. The article describes the survey and reports its results. They support the conclusion that lawyers in a wide range of domestic practices regularly confront the need to know something about international and foreign law. Even when they represent fairly “ordinary” clients in what can be characterized as “typical” legal matters, they routinely encounter situations where they need to research questions of foreign or international law, and to incorporate the results of that research into their work product. Building on these theoretical arguments and empirical observations, the article concludes by describing an experimental attempt to incorporate international and foreign law into a traditional first year LRW course. It discusses some of the challenges involved in working international and foreign legal issues into a domestic legal problem, and how those challenges were addressed in context. It also provides guidance and suggestions for possible LRW problem development, based in part on ideas derived from our survey responses.
El sistema implantado en la universidad española al abrigo de Bolonia incluye cambios en la metodología docente que obligan a repensar la misión del profesor universitario. Se ha insistido mucho en la innovación, pero no siempre lo que se llama así constituye una auténtica novedad, lo que nos obliga a tener muy en cuenta la tradición y el modelo de los viejos maestros. Es importante distinguir lo que son simples herramientas de los fines de la educación superior, y subrayar que el profesor universitario se caracteriza por una vocación intelectual de compromiso con la verdad.
El proceso de Bolonia aspira a fomentar la movilidad de estudiantes y profesores, facilitando la lectura de los planes de estudio de las distintas universidades y, con ello, el reconocimiento de los créditos cursados en otros países. Ello abre las puertas a numerosas fórmulas de internacionalización de la enseñanza jurídica que aquí se pondrán de manifiesto; más allá de la inclusión en el currículum de la posibilidad de pasar un semestre o un curso en una universidad extranjera, este trabajo persigue destacar que la apertura a otros ordenamientos jurídicos ha de proyectarse también sobre el diseño del currículum y, en particular, sobre la metodología de la enseñanza en el país donde el estudiante cursa principalmente sus estudios, a través del empleo regular del análisis de Derecho comparado y otros métodos pedagógicos.
This article recounts an experiment whereby which two teachers of international law and human rights, working on opposite sides of a large, industrialized metropolis (Sydney), brought their students together to stage an exercise in experiential learning. This exercise took the form of a student conference during which law students drawn from two very different demographic landscapes presented their research and participated collaboratively in negotiation role-plays. In this article, the authors reflect upon the successes and failings of this event, evaluating it by reference to contemporary pedagogical literature. The authors contend that collaborative teaching exercises of this kind might offer important ways of encouraging law students to move beyond the rote reproduction of a legal language nominally attentive to difference, through learning to traverse disparate parts and peoples of their own city.
The legal approach to abortion is evolving from criminal prohibition towards accommodation as a life-preserving and health-preserving option, particularly in light of data on maternal mortality and morbidity. Modern momentum for liberalization comes from international adoption of the concept of reproductive health, and wider recognition that the resort to safe and dignified healthcare is a major human right. Respect for women's reproductive self-determination legitimizes abortion as a choice when family planning services have failed, been inaccessible, or been denied by rape. Recognition of women's rights of equal citizenship with men requires that their choices for self-determination be legally respected, not criminalized.
For better or worse, law schools increasingly are rethinking their educational missions in the light of globalization-a complicated idea that builds on the expansion of international markets, the interconnection of communication, the protection of human rights, and the interrelation of ecological concerns. My home school, the New York University School of Law, established its Global Law School Program in 1995 with the expressed ambition "of transforming U.S. legal education.", Since then, the move to globalize the curriculum at other law schools has gathered steam, fueled by conferences, symposia, and workshops (of which this article is a part), with current efforts aimed at ensuring "that the vast majority, if not all, of law school graduates have exposure to issues of international, transnational, and comparative law."2 Propelled still further by support from law schools abroad, discussion now focuses not on whether to globalize the law school curriculum, but rather on how best to carry forward the idea.
Most first-year civil procedure books introduce the student early on to the differences between the civil law and common law systems. Professors have to avoid overstating the distinction. The traditional mantra that the civil law is “inquisitorial” and the common law is “adversarial” is no longer accurate. Today it is not possible to speak simply of these stereotypes as either dominant or distinct approaches to procedure in many countries. The two systems have increasingly influenced each other, and have, in turn, been influenced by other systems and traditions. Thus, it is necessary, early in the course when the civil versus common law distinction is made, to refer to transnational legal perspectives.The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which govern the structure of American civil proceedings, reflect distinctive American features like notice pleading, single-event trials with live testimony, broad discovery, a central role for counsel, liberal joinder and aggregation devices, and promotion of settlement. Civil law procedure differs on these points, and the differences can help students to appreciate, or question, the policies reflected in the Federal Rules. The American Law Institute, in conjunction with the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), has issued Principles and Rules of Transnational Civil Procedure which attempt to identify fundamental principles for transnational commercial litigation. Relevant portions of these rules are examined in this article. Reference to the principles underlying these rules can aid in students’ understanding of the workings of civil procedure.
This article is based on a presentation at the Workshop on Integrating Transnational Legal Perspectives into the First Year Curriculum at the AALS Annual Meeting in 2006. I argue that comparative torts materials can be used to teach tort concepts central to a first year torts class. To be sure, while I an advocate of comparative tort law as a subject of intrinsic interest and importance, this article is about using comparative tort materials to help students learn the law of their own jurisdiction. After offering a theoretical defense of this position, I offer two examples based on German cases involving non-economic damages.