University Faculty for LifeSamuel Wolfe Calhoun, J.D., is Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University School of Law. He received his J.D. from the University of Georgia and his B.A. from Harvard University. His teaching interests are contracts, commercial law, and legal writing. In addition, he teaches a seminar on the abortion controversy. His scholarly interests are law and religion, abortion, and jurisprudence. His most recent major piece of scholarship is “Grounding Normative Assertions: Arthur Leff’s Still Irrefutable, But Incomplete, ‘Sez Who?’ Critique,” Journal of Law and Religion 20 (2004-2005): 31ff. His website can be found at: http://law.wlu.edu/faculty.
“On Abortion and Defining a ‘Person’” by Notre Dame Professor Gary Gutting is a provocative discussion of the implications of the recent defeat of Mississippi’s personhood amendment “for the logic of the abortion debate.” Although most of the essay focuses on what the measure’s defeat reveals about people’s attitude toward the personhood of a fertilized […]
As the present battles in Kansas and Virginia show, controversies over abortion clinic regulation seem certain to continue. According to A. Barton Hinkle [Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 4, 2011], conventional labels like “conservative” and “liberal” are not predictive of where one stands on this issue. “[M]any so-called conservatives believe in limited government everywhere except the uterus.” […]
Two pro-choice advocates are publishing an article of interest in The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics: Glenn Cohen and Sadath Sayeed, Fetal Pain, Abortion, Viability and the Constitution (forthcoming April/May 2011). One significant point is that the authors implicitly corroborate the irrelevance of viability to the personhood of an infant born alive in an […]
A recently published article by Professor Stephen Gilles does an excellent job of revealing the Supreme Court’s failure to articulate a clear meaning for Roe v. Wade’s life-or-health exception: Roe’s Life-Or-Health Exception: Self-Defense or Relative-Safety?, 85 Notre Dame Law Review 525 (Feb. 2010). As many of you know, Roe allows states to prohibit abortions of […]