Submitted by Jake Widjaya on Tue, 11/02/2025 - 15:20
The Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences is delighted to announce that the 2025 Baron de Lancey Lecture will take place at 17:00 on Thursday 20 March 2025. The event will take in-person at the Law Faculty, University of Cambridge, with the option of joining virtually. Online-only attendees can watch via a live broadcast.
Register for in-person or online attendance here to secure your spot: https://barondelancey2025.eventbrite.com
Professor Kimberly D. Krawiec from the University of Virginia School of Law will explore "repugnant transactions and taboo trades" — markets that are morally contested and sometimes even prohibited, such as sex work, commercial surrogacy, and the sale of organs, eggs, and sperm. She will ask how we, as a society, decide what is up for sale and what is off-limits.
The controversies here are not about the dangers of markets themselves, but rather the dangers of buying/selling certain goods or services. Advocates of market restrictions seek to define the ethical boundaries of the marketplace – to identify the specific goods and services that are inappropriate for market trading, and to explain why these restrictions should exist even for apparently willing buyers and sellers.
Although all cultures have deemed some transactions too sacred for the marketplace, the targets of these restrictions have varied widely, even within a given time period. For example, prostitution is currently legal in much of the world but illegal in most of the United States. Meanwhile, commercial surrogacy and paid egg donation are legal in much of the United States but illegal in many other parts of the world.
This talk will delve into these and other restricted trades. It will identify how they are regulated by legal regimes as well as social norms, evaluate the consequences of different approaches, and explore potential paths forward.
About the Speaker: Professor Kimberly D. Krawiec holds the Charles O. Gregory Professorship of Law at the University of Virginia. Her current research analyses “taboo trades” — exchanges that are contested by society and, in some cases, forbidden altogether. She has written on commercial surrogacy, egg and sperm markets, and sex work. At the moment, much of her work is on incentives for organ donation. Another area of her research centres on the regulation of financial markets and business organizations. Prof. Krawiec has extensively examined the administrative process surrounding the Volcker Rule, a complex and highly contested provision of the Dodd-Frank Act. She has also researched corporate boards of directors. Through an ethnographic method, this work analyses directors’ views on the workings of the corporate boardroom and board relations with management, with a special emphasis on directors’ views on race and gender diversity in the boardroom.
With a wealth of experience in commodity and derivatives law, she has also been a commentator for the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI) of the American Bar Association and has taught at top institutions including Duke, North Carolina, Harvard, and Northwestern, where she won the Robert Childres Award for Teaching Excellence.
Join us for a thought-provoking evening, and be part of conversations shaping the future of medical law and ethics.
For further information, please contact jsjw2@cam.ac.uk.
The Baron de Lancey Lecture series is kindly supported by the Ver Heyden de Lancey Fund.