Law Students Receive Consortium Support for Research Projects

Four Law School students are engaged in research projects that have been awarded grants from the University's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. Each academic year, the Consortium, via its Intramural Research Awards program, requests proposals from graduate and professional students who wish to study and/or ameliorate the societal implications of problems in the fields of health, the environment, and the life sciences. This year, 34 proposals from students in 26 programs across the University were received. Of the five selected for funding, two were submitted by Law School students.

Katarina Lee (’16) will conduct a project entitled "The Ethical, Medical, and Legal Concerns of Uterine Transplantation in the United States' Artificial Reproductive Technology Market." She will analyze the legal aspects of advances in uterine transplantation in Sweden, which have resulted in live births, and compare the situation there to the current legal status of organ transplantation and artificial reproductive technologies in the United States.

Lee will also participate in a project entitled "Introducing Community Lawyering into the Phillips Neighborhood Clinic's Integrated Care Model," along with Michael Laird (’16), Allison Rochford (’16), and Catherine Ellis (’17), a joint-degree student in the Law School and the School of Public Health. The four students will use the grant to fund the expansion of a medical-legal partnership between the Law School and the clinic, a student-run provider of medical, dental, pharmaceutical, and social work services in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis. The goal of the partnership is to provide legal referrals and resources directly to patients in an effort to minimize systemic barriers to health, such as substandard housing, lack of access to disability benefits, hunger, and immigration status.