MacLean Ethics Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, University of Chicago Law School

Professor Smolensky is a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law school where she teaches reproductive law and ethics and legal research and writing.  She is also an Ethics Fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinic Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago.  Her current works in progress are “The Rights of the Dead” and “Defining Life from the Perspective of Death.”  And her recent publications include “Telemedicine Reimbursement: Raising the Iron Triangle To A New Plateau,” and “Any DNA to Declare? Regulating Offshore Access To Genetic Enhancement.”  She was recently a panelist at the University of Chicago Divinity School’s “Finitude: Defining Death in the Public Sphere, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Contemporary Reflections on the Body” and a moderator at The University of Chicago Legal Forum’s symposium “Defining Life: Bioethics, Law & Life: Definitions and Decision Making.”

She graduated with a B.A. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 2002.  After law school, she worked as a litigation and health care associate for Wildman, Harrold, Allen and Dixon in Chicago, Illinois.  This fall she will be joining the faculty at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law as an Associate Law Professor.

It has been suggested that children may one day be able to sue their parents for negligently engineering their germline.  In fact, certain international documents suggest that everyone has a legal right to reparations for damages sustained as a result of harmful genetic interventions.  Documents like this may one day form the basis for a child’s legal right to sue his or her parents for making “bad” choices when enhancing their child’s genetic germline.  This paper argues that while children may have a moral right to an unaltered genome, they do not and should not have a concomitant legal right absent a large, and unlikely, expansion of current tort law.