Radhika Rao

University of California, Hastings College of the Law | UC Hastings · Law

Recent cases involving biosamples taken from indigenous tribes and newborn babies reveal the emptiness of informed consent. This venerable doctrine often functions as a charade, a collective fiction which thinly masks the uncomfortable fact that the subjects of human research are not actually afforded full information regarding the types of researc...

Selective reduction and abortion both involve the termination of fetal life, but they are classified by different designations to underscore the notion that they are regarded as fundamentally different medical procedures: the two are performed using distinct techniques by different types of physicians, upon women under very different circumstances,...

Rather than informed consent, dispositional authorization may be the preferred strategy in obtaining gamete donations for embryonic stem cell research.

This article compares three frameworks for legal regulation of the human body. Property law systematically favors those who use the body to create commercial products. Yet contract and privacy rights cannot compete with the property paradigm, which alone affords a complete bundle of rights enforceable against the whole world. In the face of researc...

In this Article, Professor Radhika Rao sketches out the parameters of the constitutional right of privacy and applies the right to "new" reproductive technologies, such as artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. The thesis of the Article is that privacy - currently miscast as an individual right - must be reconceived as a re...