What is the price of a limb? A child? Ethnicity? Love? In a world that
is often ruled by buyers and sellers, those things that are often
considered priceless become objects to be marketed and from which to
earn a profit. Ranging from black market babies to exploitative sex
trade operations to the marketing of race and culture, Rethinking
Commodification presents an interdisciplinary collection of writings,
including legal theory, case law, and original essays to reexamine the
traditional legal question: ?To commodify or not to commodify?"
In this pathbreaking course reader, Martha M. Ertman and Joan C.
Williams present the legal cases and theories that laid the groundwork
for traditional critiques of commodification, which tend to view the
process as dehumanizing because it reduces all human interactions to
economic transactions. This "canonical" section is followed by a
selection of original essays that present alternative views of
commodification based on the concept that commodification can have
diverse meanings in a variety of social contexts. When viewed in this
way, the commodification debate moves beyond whether or not
commodification is good or bad, and is assessed instead on the quality
of the social relationships and wider context that is involved in the
transaction. Rethinking Commodification contains an excellent array
of contemporary issues, including intellectual property, reparations for
slavery, organ transplants, and sex work; and an equally stellar array
of contributors, including Richard Posner, Margaret Jane Radin, Regina
Austin, and many others.
