Goodwin, Michele

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GOODWIN, Michele

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: University of Wisconsin, B.A.; Boston College, J.D.; University of Wisconsin, LL.M.

ADDRESSES:

Office—College of Law, DePaul University, 25 E. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60604; fax: 312-362-5448. E-mail—[email protected]

CAREER:

University of Wisconsin, associate dean of the law school; DePaul University, Chicago, IL, associate professor of law, director of the Health Law Institute, and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Bioethics. Berkeley School of Law, Center for the Study of Law and Society, visiting scholar, 2002; Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, visiting professor; Yale University, postdoctoral fellow. American Association of Law Schools, member of the executive board of the section on law and medicine; member of the Kentucky Education Equity Task Force; Cleveland Home for Girls, member of the board of trustees; holds office with the Wisconsin Community Fund; Mediation Association of Kentucky, mediator; Institute for Legal Studies, affiliated scholar.

MEMBER:

International Academy of Law and Mental Health (member of the board of directors of the scientific committee), International Committee on Women and Mental Health, Critical European Legal Conference, Illinois Institute of Medicine (fellow).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named an Anna J. Cooper Scholar and a William H. Hastie Fellow, University of Wisconsin; commissioned a Colonel, State of Kentucky, for her distinguished services in education and medicine; Woman of the Year award, Urban League; Pioneering Woman award, Historical Society of Chicago; Excellence in Scholarship Award, DePaul University, 2005; Humanities Award and Faculty Achievement Award, both DePaul University, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to scholarly journals, including the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism; contributor of op-ed pieces to the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, and Chicago Sun-Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

Michele Goodwin is a law professor who specializes in the interactions of the law, racial discrimination, and health care. Her first book, Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts, shows how the market for donated organs in the United States has been warped by the laws surrounding organ donation. According to Goodwin, the harm from the current system falls disproportionately on African Americans. For example, Goodwin discusses disturbing "presumed consent" laws, which allow medical staff to remove organs from certain bodies without the consent of the deceased or his or her family. The bodies of young African-American and Latino murder victims are frequently subjected to such nonconsensual harvesting, Goodwin shows. African Americans are also less likely to receive organs—in part, Goodwin claims, because of racism in the process of allocating scarce donated organs. In these sections of the book Goodwin "artfully uses case law and tragic stories of people caught in the machinery" of the current system to illustrate the problem, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor. Then, after laying out the deficiencies in the current system, Goodwin proposes a new system in which the families of the deceased could be compensated for the donation of the organs. Black Markets "says important things to lawyers, doctors, and others interested in healthcare law and bioethics," Elizabeth Williams concluded in a review for Library Journal.