Markets and Morals Series Features Talk on ‘Taboo Trades in the Human Body’

By Drewry Sackett
October 20, 2016

“Although financial incentives are part of the menu, I am most interested in non-financial incentives, such as kidney swaps…”

Kimberly Krawiec, the Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law at Duke University and senior fellow and faculty council member at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, will give a lecture at Washington and Lee University on Nov. 14 at 5 p.m. in Northen Auditorium, Leyburn Library.

The title of Krawiec’s talk is “Gifts Within Markets? Taboo Trades in the Human Body.” It is free and open to the public.

Her lecture is part of the year-long series on Markets and Morals and is sponsored by W&L’s Roger Mudd Center for Ethics. For more information about this series, see: https://www.wlu.edu/mudd-center/programs-and-events/2016-2017-markets-and-morals.

“Much of my current research analyzes taboo trades — exchanges that are contested by society and, in some cases, forbidden altogether. I have written on commercial surrogacy, egg and sperm markets and sex work,” said Krawiec.

“At the moment, much of my work is on incentives for organ donation. Although financial incentives are part of the menu, I am most interested in non-financial incentives, such as kidney swaps, NEAD (nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donorchains) and priority systems that provide an incentive to donate.”

Krawiec, an expert on corporate law, teaches courses on securities, corporate and derivatives law. Her research interests include the empirical analysis of contract disputes; the choice of organizational form by professional service firms, including law firms; forbidden or taboo markets; insider trading; derivatives hedging practices; and rogue trading.

Prior to joining academia, Krawiec was a member of the commodity and derivatives group at the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell. She has served as a commentator for the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative of the American Bar Association and on the faculty of the National Association of Securities Dealers Institute for Professional Development at the Wharton School of Business.

She also has taught law at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Harvard and Northwestern.

Krawiec has authored “Is Informed Consent Enough?” in the “American Journal of Transplantation (2016); “Price and Pretense in The Baby Market,” in “Baby Markets: Money, Morals and The Neopolitics of Choice” (2009); and “Altruism and Intermediation in the Market for Babies,” in the Washington and Lee Law Review (2009).