Columbia Law School Professor Carol Sanger Honored for Scholarship
Sanger's Article About the Significance of Stillborn Birth Certificates Recognized by Journal As "Exemplary Legal Writing"
New York, October 11, 2013— Columbia Law School Professor Carol Sanger’s scholarship on the legal and cultural significance of stillborn birth certificates has been honored by The Green Bag, a legal journal dedicated to readable and accessible writing about the law.
The Green Bag’s board of advisers recognized Sanger’s “‘The Birth of Death’: Stillborn Birth Certificates and the Problem for Law” as “exemplary legal writing.” The article, which first appeared in the California Law Review in 2012, explores challenging issues surrounding so-called “Missing Angel Acts” that in many states authorize parents to request birth certificates for stillborn babies.
In the piece, Sanger asks “whether there are reasons to hesitate before blurring traditional markers between life and death and between private and public mourning as a matter of law. And if we do blur these lines, how should we conceptualize and measure the costs of doing so?”
The Green Bag reproduced the entirety of Sanger’s piece in its 2013 Almanac & Reader. Also honored in Sanger’s “Long Articles” category were Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and NYU School of Law Professor Arthur R. Miller.
Sanger, the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law, has been a member of the Columbia Law School faculty since 1996. Her scholarship includes contracts, family law, reproduction, gender, and law’s relation to culture. She is a recipient of the Columbia University Presidential Teaching Prize and the Law School’s Willis Reese Teaching Prize.