The legal website Jotwell recently featured works by University of Houston Law Professors Leah Fowler and Jessica Mantel. Jotwell serves as a platform for legal academics to recognize, celebrate, and discuss the finest and most recent legal scholarship.
Professor Fowler’s research titled “Femtechnodystopia,” written with Michael R. Ulrich from Boston University’s School of Law, examines fertility awareness-based contraception and proception apps, which empower users to manage their reproductive choices but can pose legal risks due to lack of privacy. The paper was reviewed by Professor Myrisha S. Lewis from William & Mary Law School.
Lewis noted that Professor Fowler and Professor Ulrich identified three key criteria that Femtech must meet to prevent a potential dystopian future: accuracy, privacy, and the consumer’s awareness of risks and limitations.
“Ultimately, the authors do not recommend that users abandon these applications,” wrote Lewis in the review. “Instead, Part III of the article provides many creative solutions to the issues facing period and fertility tracking apps after Dobbs.”
The article concludes with Lewis emphasizing the authors' concerns, not only about the legal risks, but also about the apps' ineffectiveness and the lack of robust privacy protections.
“As technology permeates our lives, it is worth continually revisiting the authors’ caution: ‘Technology in a world with an anemic right to privacy endangers everyone’ (p. 1313),” wrote Lewis.
Professor Mantel’s article titled “Age is More Than Just a Number: A Legal and Ethical Defense of Age-Based Triage Protocols” concerning the legal aspects of age-based protocols and examining the ethical considerations surrounding the prioritization of scarce medical resources during times of shortage, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, was reviewed by Professor Zack Buck from the University of Tennessee College of Law.
“Like her other scholarship, Mantel takes on a relevant problem, provides an interesting analysis of the problem, and leaves the reader with a roadmap of implementable and practical solutions—in this case, a regulatory reinterpretation,” wrote Buck in the review.
By the conclusion of the review, Buck emphasizes the critical importance of focusing on health law in the aftermath of times of scarcity, stating, “This type of work—always important within health law scholarship—is made all the more important on the heels of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.”
For more than a decade, Jotwell, the Journal of Things We Like (Lots), has been a space “to identify, celebrate, and discuss the best new scholarship relevant to the law.”
Original source can be found here.