Colloquium - Gender, Law and Health Care: New Perspectives for Teaching and Scholarship: the Role of Gender in Law and Health Care

For the last two years, I have focused on gender issues in the seminar I teach on law and biomedical sciences. My primary goal in the seminar has been to combine a basic exploration of the major themes in law and biomedical sciences with an examination of related gender issues. Although I did not consider myself versed in feminist legal theory, I had been working on a number of women's health issues and found a lack of attention to gender in health care law. This introductory essay will discuss how and why I decided to teach this seminar and will review the pedagogical decisions I made in choosing topics and materials. Finally, it will introduce the four student-written Comments that follow and attempt to place them in the context of the themes and objectives of the seminar, as well as within an analytical framework informed by feminist legal perspectives. It has been eleven years since I taught my first seminar on law and biomedical sciences. The seminar began as a survey of such issues as informed consent, medical experimentation, reproductive technologies, and death and dying. For guidance, I used a casebook,' but I quickly became frustrated by how limited I was by this approach and by how many "supplemental materials" were needed to make the course complete. The issues were so diverse and constantly changing as a result of new discoveries and technologies that it was difficult to get a handle on the priorities and most current developments. It also seemed that there were so many issues to cover that there was no time