Osler's Razor

I have been devoting Wednesdays on my blog to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law class of 1990, who are out doing some fascinating things in the U.S. and beyond.

Many of my classmates have gone on to be professors, but if I had the chance to sit in on one of their classes, I might well pick Prof. April Cherry's class on Women and the Law at Cleveland State Law School. Based on what I know of her, I would love to learn from her.

Prof. Cherry came to Yale from Vassar, where she had graduated with honors. She excelled at Yale, too, where she was a Senior Editor of the Law Journal. After Yale, it did not take her long to find her way to the academy, first at Florida State and then at her current home.

The focus of her work is on women, reproductive rights, and ethics-- topics at the center of some our most important national debates. It takes a certain bravery to enter into those debates, and I admire those who do. Her work isn't an abstraction, either; it connects theory and thought to what is really going on in our world, sometimes out of reach of the law. For example, one of her articles is titled "The Rise of the Reproductive Brothel in the Global Economy: Some Thoughts on Reproductive Tourism, Autonomy, and Justice." You can download it here, and if you do you might find (as I did) that there is a world of international reproductive commerce out there (surrogacy) that has raised a new wealth of important questions about bodies, rights, and exploitation.

The world is better because of the people who raise up the unseen, and Prof. Cherry is one of those valuable people.