Michele Goodwin
Biographic Data
| ID | 3606382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michele Goodwin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michele |
| FAMILY NAME | Goodwin |
| SIGNATURE | GOODWIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6860-0374 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
To be a citizen
What does it mean to be a citizen? To be equal in birth and stature as others born in the same land? How does law answer these questions and are the answers satisfying? Have the goalposts of citizenship shifted such that old, exlusionary notions of citizenship based on wealth, race, and sex now dangerously infect our society? These questions and this Essay are derived from the 2025 Presidential Address given at the Law and Society annual meeting
Reproductive Policing
In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned nearly fifty years of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade in its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization . In the period since, mounting legal and medical chaos has emerged, testing the limits of law and legal order and resulting in heightened surveillance and policing of pregnancy and motherhood. This review, however, starts from the perspective that reproductive…
The Body Politic
This essay is presented in remembrance of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It draws upon my writings from the past decade to articulate the importance of a feminist lens in law and to underscore the urgency of feminist jurisprudence, especially in reproductive health, rights, and justice. Its timing arrives at a moment of attacks on reproductive rights in the form of antiabortion legislation, rollbacks on sex education in schools, contestation agains…
A Different Type of Property
A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Law and Anti-Blackness
This Article addresses a thin slice of the American stain. Its value derives from the conversation it attempts to foster related to reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project attempted to illuminate and make sense of slavery through its Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From 1936-1938, so too this project seeks to uncover and name law’s role in fomenting racial division and caste. Part I turns to pathos and h…
Excerpt of Law and Anti-Blackness
Professor Michele Goodwin’s essay here (and the article from which it came, to be published in full in our Winter issue) explicitly identifies the development of American law as a project of cementing racial caste. This piece is a call for conversation and asks us all to consider: “How has the failure to acknowledge and address the carnage and prurience of America’s racial origin story impacted life today?” For 26 volumes, we have attempted to an…
Policing the Womb
In Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin explores how states abuse laws and infringe on rights to police women and their pregnancies. This book looks at the impact of these often arbitrary laws which can result in the punishment, incarceration, and humiliation of women, particularly poor women and women of color. Frequently based on unscientific claims of endangering a fetus, these laws allow extraordinary powers to state authorities over reproducti…
Policing the Womb
Revisiting Death
For nearly five years, bioethicists and neurologists debated whether Jahi McMath, an African American teenager, was alive or dead. While Jahi's condition provides a compelling study for analyzing brain death, circumscribing her life status to a question of brain death fails to acknowledge and respond to a chronic, if uncomfortable, bioethics problem in American health care—namely, racial bias and unequal treatment, both real and perceived. Bioeth…
How the Criminalization of Pregnancy Robs Women of Reproductive Autonomy
In 2003, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Regina McKnight, an African American woman who was convicted at the age of twenty‐two for committing “homicide by child abuse.” She became the first woman in the United States to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for experiencing a stillbirth. Rather than an outlier case in the annals of American jurisprudence that stretched law beyond reason while restraining compassion and …
If Embryos and Fetuses Have Rights
What exactly does it mean to be human or for that matter a “non-human”? This essay unpacks questions regarding the personhood of embryos and fetuses. It takes as its lead the escalating political demand for embryos to attain rights and the status of children. The essay argues that such political demands are not in isolation physically, medically, or legally of women’s health and rights. It makes the case that embryos and fetuses cannot be granted…
Law, Bioethics, and Biotechnology
Marital Rape
If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive.State v. Oliver, 70 N.C. 60, 62 (1874)Prologue: The ContextSadly, sexual violence against women and girls remains deeply entrenched and politicized around the globe. Perhaps no other allegation of crime exposes a woman's credibility to su…
The Veneer of Altruism
The United States government’s insistence that organs can only be procured through altruism, rather than being exchanged or purchased, contributes to the very exploitation of people of color in developing countries it sought to prevent
Relational Markets and Justice Paradoxes
This project places at its center the urgency for a more responsive organ transplant policy in the United States. It studies how relationships and affinity affiliations motivate intimate exchanges, including human biological markets. Specifically, the article considers whether affinity relationships might serve as a platform in the domain of organ transplantation and if so, whether the law should tolerate discriminatory behavior in the human biol…
Black Markets
In America, in direct response to indefinite delays on the national transplantation waitlists and an inadequate supply of organs, a growing number of terminally ill Americans are turning to international underground markets and coordinators or brokers for organs. Chinese inmates on death-row and the economically disadvantaged in India and Brazil are the often compromised co-participants in the private negotiation process, which occurs outside the…
The Body Politic
This essay is presented in remembrance of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It draws upon my writings from the past decade to articulate the importance of a feminist lens in law and to underscore the urgency of feminist jurisprudence, especially in reproductive health, rights, and justice. Its timing arrives at a moment of attacks on reproductive rights in the form of antiabortion legislation, rollbacks on sex education in schools, contestation agains…
If Embryos and Fetuses Have Rights
What exactly does it mean to be human or for that matter a “non-human”? This essay unpacks questions regarding the personhood of embryos and fetuses. It takes as its lead the escalating political demand for embryos to attain rights and the status of children. The essay argues that such political demands are not in isolation physically, medically, or legally of women’s health and rights. It makes the case that embryos and fetuses cannot be granted…
Marital Rape
If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive.State v. Oliver, 70 N.C. 60, 62 (1874)Prologue: The ContextSadly, sexual violence against women and girls remains deeply entrenched and politicized around the globe. Perhaps no other allegation of crime exposes a woman's credibility to su…
Black Markets
In America, in direct response to indefinite delays on the national transplantation waitlists and an inadequate supply of organs, a growing number of terminally ill Americans are turning to international underground markets and coordinators or brokers for organs. Chinese inmates on death-row and the economically disadvantaged in India and Brazil are the often compromised co-participants in the private negotiation process, which occurs outside the…
Relational Markets and Justice Paradoxes
This project places at its center the urgency for a more responsive organ transplant policy in the United States. It studies how relationships and affinity affiliations motivate intimate exchanges, including human biological markets. Specifically, the article considers whether affinity relationships might serve as a platform in the domain of organ transplantation and if so, whether the law should tolerate discriminatory behavior in the human biol…
The Veneer of Altruism
The United States government’s insistence that organs can only be procured through altruism, rather than being exchanged or purchased, contributes to the very exploitation of people of color in developing countries it sought to prevent
Law, Bioethics, and Biotechnology
Marital Rape
If no permanent injury has been inflicted, nor malice, cruelty nor dangerous violence shown by the husband, it is better to draw the curtain, shut out the public gaze, and leave the parties to forget and forgive.State v. Oliver, 70 N.C. 60, 62 (1874)Prologue: The ContextSadly, sexual violence against women and girls remains deeply entrenched and politicized around the globe. Perhaps no other allegation of crime exposes a woman's credibility to su…
How the Criminalization of Pregnancy Robs Women of Reproductive Autonomy
In 2003, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Regina McKnight, an African American woman who was convicted at the age of twenty‐two for committing “homicide by child abuse.” She became the first woman in the United States to be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for experiencing a stillbirth. Rather than an outlier case in the annals of American jurisprudence that stretched law beyond reason while restraining compassion and …
If Embryos and Fetuses Have Rights
What exactly does it mean to be human or for that matter a “non-human”? This essay unpacks questions regarding the personhood of embryos and fetuses. It takes as its lead the escalating political demand for embryos to attain rights and the status of children. The essay argues that such political demands are not in isolation physically, medically, or legally of women’s health and rights. It makes the case that embryos and fetuses cannot be granted…
Revisiting Death
For nearly five years, bioethicists and neurologists debated whether Jahi McMath, an African American teenager, was alive or dead. While Jahi's condition provides a compelling study for analyzing brain death, circumscribing her life status to a question of brain death fails to acknowledge and respond to a chronic, if uncomfortable, bioethics problem in American health care—namely, racial bias and unequal treatment, both real and perceived. Bioeth…
Policing the Womb
In Policing the Womb, Michele Goodwin explores how states abuse laws and infringe on rights to police women and their pregnancies. This book looks at the impact of these often arbitrary laws which can result in the punishment, incarceration, and humiliation of women, particularly poor women and women of color. Frequently based on unscientific claims of endangering a fetus, these laws allow extraordinary powers to state authorities over reproducti…
Policing the Womb
A Different Type of Property
A Review of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. by Harriet A. Jacobs, and They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Law and Anti-Blackness
This Article addresses a thin slice of the American stain. Its value derives from the conversation it attempts to foster related to reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project attempted to illuminate and make sense of slavery through its Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From 1936-1938, so too this project seeks to uncover and name law’s role in fomenting racial division and caste. Part I turns to pathos and h…
Excerpt of Law and Anti-Blackness
Professor Michele Goodwin’s essay here (and the article from which it came, to be published in full in our Winter issue) explicitly identifies the development of American law as a project of cementing racial caste. This piece is a call for conversation and asks us all to consider: “How has the failure to acknowledge and address the carnage and prurience of America’s racial origin story impacted life today?” For 26 volumes, we have attempted to an…
The Body Politic
This essay is presented in remembrance of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It draws upon my writings from the past decade to articulate the importance of a feminist lens in law and to underscore the urgency of feminist jurisprudence, especially in reproductive health, rights, and justice. Its timing arrives at a moment of attacks on reproductive rights in the form of antiabortion legislation, rollbacks on sex education in schools, contestation agains…
Reproductive Policing
In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned nearly fifty years of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade in its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization . In the period since, mounting legal and medical chaos has emerged, testing the limits of law and legal order and resulting in heightened surveillance and policing of pregnancy and motherhood. This review, however, starts from the perspective that reproductive…
To be a citizen
What does it mean to be a citizen? To be equal in birth and stature as others born in the same land? How does law answer these questions and are the answers satisfying? Have the goalposts of citizenship shifted such that old, exlusionary notions of citizenship based on wealth, race, and sex now dangerously infect our society? These questions and this Essay are derived from the 2025 Presidential Address given at the Law and Society annual meeting
Law (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Criminology (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Medicine (4 works) · Biology (3 works) · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse (3 works) · Jurisprudence (3 works) · Law and economics (3 works)