Barack Obama's Case Comment on Abortion for the Harvard Law Review: Politico.com has the scoop. According to the article, the citation for the case comment is 103 Harv. L. Rev. 823.

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  1. Obama's Case Note:
  2. Barack Obama's Case Comment on Abortion for the Harvard Law Review:
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Obama's Case Note:

I just read the piece, and it is as calm and fairly uncontroversial as most people say.

Pretending for a moment that we actually care about the article as an article, my one suggestion would have been to pay a bit more attention to the risk of collusive lawsuits: Since the fetus-mother lawsuit would usually make sense only if the mother has liability insurance -- as many people do, just under their auto insurance or homeowner's insurance policies -- there would be very great temptation in an injury case for the mother to overstate her possible negligence, so the fetus gets more money from the insurance company. I imagine many a person, even one who is ordinarily quite ethical, might find this temptation hard to resist in a case such as this one, when it's a matter of helping one's family (especially when the family will be facing huge medical or supplemental care bills as a result of the injury) at the expense of a faceless insurance company. The article mentions the insurance factor as a reason to worry about generally higher premiums for pregnant women, but not the collusive lawsuit concern.

But this is a minor criticism. For what it is, the article is quite good -- well-written and well-reasoned. It's nothing really innovative or valuable, but a short case note is a poor medium for saying anything really innovative or valuable. That's one reason I urge students to write not short case notes but rather longer articles about broader issues (using several specific cases as illustration). But the Harvard Law Review has its own traditions on this -- and I guess in this one highly unusual scenario, a case note really has made a splash.

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