CRRJ Faculty Director Melissa Murray and Founding Faculty Director Emerita Kristin Luker spent the last two years co-authoring what they call their "best effort to provide structure to an intellectual and legal inquiry about how the law regulates all realms of reproduction, and in so doing, shapes our daily lives." They have also written a Teachers' Manual, which includes background stories to accompany the cases and popular culture references to enliven class discussions.

"We are thrilled to share this long-awaited, in-demand teaching tool with faculty and adjunct practitioners throughout the country who have, thus far, been forced to cobble together their own course materials or forgo offering the course in the absence of a casebook," said the book's Executive Editor and CRRJ Executive Director Jill E. Adams '06. She anticipates an uptick in reproductive rights seminars and reading groups on law school campuses as a result of the book's availability.

Associate Professor Aziza Ahmed '07 has been teaching a course titled "Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights" since she joined the faculty of Northeastern School of Law in 2010. "The casebook will be a boon to my teaching," she said, "Both as a comprehensive resource for students and as a landmark pronouncement of the legitimacy of this field of study." Ahmed was a student in Luker's first reproductive rights seminar and can appreciate the depth and texture brought to these complex issues by the interlocking disciplinary perspectives of law and sociology.

This unusual pairing of a legal scholar and social scientist did not occur by accident. The authors intentionally seek to "locate reproductive rights and justice issues in the historical and political context in which legal doctrine and discourse have evolved." They believe this grounding will enable students to think rigorously and critically about what motivates certain laws and policies, as well as their impact on real people's lives.